I have been going on and on on twitter (on and on on and on and on, no we don’t stop ‘til the break of dawn!) about how horrible my 2-week vacation was. Let me give you a little vignette to illustrate.
We are limping home: I am badly bruised from being knocked over by a freak ocean wave. Husband is cut in two places from trying to pack the car in a hurry so we can get the hell home. Baby is very sick: feverish, eye and ear infections, and carsick on top of it all. Kid is obliviously watching Diego videos on his DVD player.
It’s 6 pm. We have 5 hours of driving to go. We’ve decided to push on until we get home, no matter how long it takes. So we are stopping for a “nice” sit-down dinner at a NOT McDonald’s. The best option we see is a Cracker Barrel in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. They have decent food, we think, and a weird store where kid can run around and pick out a dumb toy to keep him entertained.
Kid is thrilled about the store! There are lots of cars! He wants all the cars. We tell him he can pick out one car. He tells us that we should both pick out our own cars, too — how about this one mom? Dad, you want this car. We admire his cleverness and get him his one stupid car, a white Dodge Viper with pull-back action. Meanwhile the baby goes crawling after a little flashing ball as fast as he can, and almost gets stepped on by a woman with such a thick drawling accent I can barely understand a word she says. She and her daughter are concentrating as hard as they can on the wall of stuffed animals, studiously trying to pick one to buy. Meanwhile terrible, terrible country music plays on the PA. The most awful music imaginable.
Then it is time to go sit down and eat! Kid completely loses his shit, completely. All he wants in the world is to go back to the store and pick out more cars. Dodge Viper is not good enough. He refuses to eat ANY of the crappy stupid food we got for him. Apparently he is finally tired of chicken nuggets, something I never would have thought possible. Our waitress is a shell of a woman. She does not smile. She does not bring me any sauce for my fish sandwich. I ask for lots of napkins and she brings three (3). We theorize that she just had a bad breakup. Husband and I take turns corralling the now screaming kid while we try to finish dinner. Tensions are rising. Baby is obviously getting tired of being stuck in the highchair. Waitress comes back for the obligatory “is everything OK?” check, completely oblivious to the escalating tantrum situation.
“Is everything OK?” she intones, glassy eyes staring at a point somewhere behind my head.
“Well, no, but there’s nothing you can help us with,” I smile.
She splutters, confused. This is not in the script. “I mean is there anything else I can bring you?”
“No. No, thanks. Sorry. It was supposed to be a joke.”
I finish my pathetic sandwich of bread, fish, and a smear of mayo from a little packet she had brought me. I offer to take the kid outside to run around while husband and baby finish up. We make our way back through the crowded knick-knack store and somehow I convince him to just go outside. Kid insists on keeping as much distance between us as possible as he runs around crazily; fellow patrons eye me suspiciously as they walk in from the parking lot, wondering if I am that crazy kid’s mother, and if I know what a terrible parent I am. That’s not the way we do things here in the south, I’m sure they’re thinking. We keep our kids under control. Terrible country music is stuck in my head on repeat. Some line about “A mother’s love.”
Finally we are cleaned up, and now it is time for everyone to visit the bathroom, one at a time. First I bring the baby in for his diaper change. He squirms and twists to look at everyone coming into the bathroom. It is all I can do not to get us both covered in poop. Then husband brings the kid in for HIS diaper change — yes, we have completely given up on potty training for the time being, because we just don’t have the strength to withstand an extra tantrum every hour on the hour. Meanwhile the baby and I wander around the trinket store as he gets his cheeks pinched by scary drawling women calling him “honey”.
Then it’s husband’s turn to go to the bathroom, alone. I let the baby crawl in front of the restaurant as the kid continues to run around, driving his Dodge Viper into people, who tell me in sad, concerned voices how rough the concrete must be on the baby’s knees. I tell them his pants cover his knees. They dodge the Dodge Viper.
Finally I get my long-deserved minute-long bathroom break. We’re all ready to go! It is no earlier than 8:00. The whole ordeal only took two (2) hours. And we are facing five+ (5+) hours of driving before we see our beds again. We drag the kid into his car seat, get him set up with some Diego, tuck the baby into his car seat, and turn on the radio to excise the terrible country music stuck in our heads.
