Monday, August 6, 2007

The Joys of Travel

I know my blog entries have been a little infrequent lately and I apologize for that – no I don’t apologize – this is my blog for God’s sake and if I want to post something once a millennium instead of once a day that’s my business. And yet, here I am giving excuses for why I haven’t posted so I guess I really am sorry. This is why I don’t need a therapist, I’m well aware of my excessive need to please others; I don’t need to pay someone to point it out to me.

Anyway, we’ve done some weekend traveling and then every evening last week I was desperately trying to finish some scrapbook projects that were due at the state fair on Saturday. They’re absolute crap that won’t win anything and I’ll end up feeling like a dejected loser (low self esteem and lack of self confidence – something else I don’t need a therapist to point out).

However, I’ve wanted to share the joys of my weekend travels with you. Two weekends ago we went to visit Matt’s family in Kansas, which is a 6 hour drive. It started out well. Matt was nauseated, due to illness and I was nauseated at the thought of 6 hours in the van with 2 small children, but had also not been feeling well the night before. About three hours in Aaron throws up. Now the nice thing about it is that he hadn’t really eaten much that morning, but he had been drinking this blue kool aid type concoction which made things quite colorful. Luckily we were near a rest area and got everything cleaned up with minimal fuss.

About an hour later he starts crying and says “I pooped”. Now he’s been doing fantastic with the potty training so it seemed unlikely that he would have just crapped himself on purpose. We stopped again and sure enough he had pooped and it was diarrhea and thanks once again to the blue drink – it was a lovely lime green color. I figure the kid, being new to the whole “Hershey squirts” phenomenon – probably just felt like he had to fart and let it rip and there was no stopping it. So when I changed him I put new underwear on him and figured he’d tell us next time he felt the urge. Nope. Half an hour later, same scene, different gas station. This time we put a pull-up on him just in case it happened again but thankfully it didn’t.

On the way back, Gwen was the problem. Let me just start out by saying that I love my children. Love them to death! Would throw myself in front of a bus for them, run into a burning building for them, jump into a shark tank for them, wear spandex in public for them – anything! That being said, let’s talk about little Miss High Maintenance.

My daughter is the sweetest thing, but if the first 8 months of her life are any indication of what the next 18 years are going to be like raising her, I might strongly contemplate selling her on the black market to some desperate couple who wants a child.

If this kid wants something, she’s gonna get it, and usually what she wants is to be held by me and to get it she’s got to scream, and she can scream. I know I’ve only got one other kid to compare her to, and maybe he was such an angel that I got spoiled, but this kid drives me crazy. She won’t sleep by herself, she’ll scream if you leave the room. It’s getting slightly better as she’s gaining the ability to move around on her own but it wears me down. If I have somebody over to watch the kids so I can get something accomplished I have to leave the room and if I need to speak to them I have to disguise my voice because if she knows I’m there she’ll scream till I come to get her.

Somehow she managed to be fairly calm on the way down to Kansas – I think it was the fact that she was entertained by her brother’s retching and the frequent stops. However, on the way home we just really tried to push through with minimal stopping and this did not make her very happy.

So for the majority of the trip home I held her in the back seat – yes, she was removed from her car seat, which I’m well aware is not safe, however, it is safer than if I had let her scream, therefore causing me to snap and club her over the head like a baby seal. However, she still was not happy. I think she just really wanted to be out of the vehicle and had she been 8 years instead of 8 months old, her screaming would have translated into something like: “I am like so sick of riding in here Mother. You can’t do this to me. I am so going to hold my breathe until I die unless you pull this van over right now and magically transport me home because I just like seriously cannot take it anymore! This is so totally unfair!”

This is my future people. Matt thinks it’s my fault. He thinks I’ve coddled her too much. I just think she’s naturally needy and the fact that I’ve coddled her has come out of the desperate desire for her to stop crying at all hours of the day. Doesn’t help that she’s been breastfed and is physically and emotionally attached to my boobs either. Maybe it will get better after she’s weaned. In the meantime, I’m not taking anymore road trips over 2 hours in length if I can help it.

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