The road less traveled

I'm really behind with my blogging right now! I'm sure the crazy summer schedule has nothing to do with it.

A few weeks ago, the boys and I took a trip up to Indiana to visit my family. Keith has been super busy with work and wasn't able to come with us, but I really wanted to be able to go see them before Garrett starts school next month. So I decided to bite the bullet and make the trip with just me and the boys. For a variety of reasons, I decided to drive us up there rather than fly. Unfortunately it's a 14 hour drive. I debated between breaking the trip up into 2 days or just driving straight through and decided to just drive straight through. The hassle of checking into and out of a hotel and all the complications that come with corraling 2 kids in a hotel room just did not sound appealing.

The day before our trip, I got our SUV set up in a way that would be convenient for me to attempt to keep them entertained, fed, etc, without having a wreck and without needing to pull over every hour. In the seat between the boys' carseats, I put a soft-sided box with a variety of toys in it ranging from small cars to coloring books to stuffed animals. Next to each boys' seat, was a small throw blanket for when they were tired or cold. In the middle of the floor, within my reach, I put a second soft-sided box and filled it with easily dispensible snacks along with a container of wipes and a roll of paper towels. Then in the front passenger seat I had a small cooler with sandwiches and drinks. I pre-filled cups of water and put them in the boys' cup holders in case they got thirsty. I had DVD's in the pocket of the seat in front of Garrett and the portable DVD player was strapped to the headrest of the passenger seat in front of Cooper. Since we've had the same DVD player for years, I have the buttons memorized and know the play and eject buttons by touch, so I was able to change and start DVD's while driving. (I promise I was extremely safe with all of this!) Garrett had the laptop to watch his own movies on so I didn't have to listen to them argue about what they were going to watch.

We left at 4am on a Sunday. We carried the boys out and strapped them into their carseats. They stayed awake for an hour or so and then went back to sleep and slept for a couple of hours. We were almost to Arkansas when they woke up. We ate breakfast in the car (granola bars) and then settled into a routine of movies, toys, coloring and snacks. About 5-6 hours into the trip, we made our first stop to fill up with gas. After I started the gas pumping, Garrett picked up the toys that were thrown around the car and in the floor while I changed Cooper's diaper in the driver's seat. Once the tank was full, then we all walked into the gas station for a quick bathroom stop. We were back on the road minutes later.

The trip went really smoothly. We only stopped one other time, in Missouri, just a few miles shy of the Illinois state line. At lunch time, we ate the sandwiches I packed for lunch while in the car on the interstate and we had our snacks later in the day and the boys did amazing! My biggest concern was the weather because the weather channel was forecasting 40% chance of rain for a good part of the area we were driving through. Thankfully we only were sprinkled on in northeast Arkansas and the rest of the trip was sunny.

We crossed the state line into Indiana and ran smack dab into road construction. Road construction that had our side of the road down to one lane which was traveling at approximately 3 mph. By this point, we had been in the car for 13 hours and we were 1 hour from our destination. I grew up in this general area of Indiana and am vaguely familiar with the roads, so I called Keith and told him to walk me through how to get from the interstate I was on, to a 4 lane highway that I knew was close by. I just could not handle sitting there any longer. It may have cleared up minutes later, but my sanity was holding on by a thread at this point.

Traffic finally crawled up to an exit where I was able to get off and manuever my way around to the other road. At some point along the way, I had to pull over and change a dirty diaper. The poor kid had attempted to hold it as long as he could, but it wasn't happening any longer. (He has a pretty good "schedule" with this and normally takes care of business in the mornings. By this point it was about 7pm. For a 2 year old, this was good.) Once we made it to my parents' house, we were only about an hour behind schedule, which isn't too bad since we had to take a different road which cuts through small towns with traffic lights, not to mention at least half an hour was spent virtually sitting still on the interstate.

Truly, my boys behaved so well on this trip. I was really surprised. There were only a few whining moments (at least one of them was mine during the road construction. I will completely own up to that) along with a handful of times where I had to explain to them that I could not come back there and help with this or that, they would need to figure it out. Thankfully there were no tantrums thrown and no screaming. This is a huge achievement.

Tomorrow, I will share about all the fun stuff we did in Indiana. If we're friends on Facebook, I've already posted quite a few pictures from this trip.