Vacation: Done

Hello there! You are very welcome for leaving that post up there for the last three weeks. I just wanted to make sure you had enough time to think about it. And then I went on vacation for two weeks. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

In all seriousness, I so appreciated the comments here and on Facebook – they really meant a lot and make me so glad I shared my story/struggles here. I hope that someone else will be inspired or at least feel not so alone with their own “things.” We need each other – we all do – to talk to, to do life with and to be real with. I hope you have those people in your life and if you don’t, find them, they are out there.

In other news, my post, Working Girl, has gotten over 400 hits in the last week which made me curious as to why that would be so I took a look at my referrers/stats and found out that a Buzzfeed quiz wondering how 90s you are uses my image of Skidz pants. Thankfully it wasn’t an influx of traffic due to people looking for a “working” girl named Michelle or a sudden rebirth of hypercolor clothing. And in case you were wondering, I am a 90s expert.

So, how about a little funny for your day?

For our vacation, like last year, we road-tripped to Texas to visit my parents and my brother and sister-in-law (with a side trip to Columbia, Missouri to visit my nephew at college). That is many, many hours in the car. Many. Here are some of the things my kids found funny during that trip:

• Hitting each other in the face with their pillow pets, which I would totally put up with except the decided to start doing it as we were entering Houston – land of the 4+ lane expressway. They were laughing, drunk on french fries, jelly beans and twizzlers, and we (Simon and I) were not.
• Any mention of the words fart, butt, bottom, nuts, balls (or, as Jack says, his “bulbs”), penis, wee wee, poop and the like.
• Signs for Jack In The Box
• Minecraft You Tube videos
• Singing along, dramatically, to “Let It Go” from Frozen
• Jack peeing on the side of the highway in rural Texas and again in less rural Illinois
• Jack growling fiercely and totally ruining his voice
• Me offering to pay them $2 if they fell asleep (for the record, in the 40+ hours we spent in the car at various hours – the only time they slept was the 15 minutes before we got to Corpus Christi at the very end of our second day of driving – my kids suck at napping)
• Our having to use the “butt wipes” (a.k.a., Cottonelle Moist Wipes) on their hands and faces after they snacked (also, moist = worst word ever)
• Monsters University, Scooby Doo + Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Things the grown ups laughed at:

• Jack gleefully exclaiming after a successful round of Yahtzee: “I freaking won! See ya suckas!”
• That was pretty much it. 🙂

Really, a good time was (mostly) had by all during the driving portions of our trip. You expect it to be long and tiring, you expect the kids to bug each other and you expect to question your own sanity for attempting it. But in the end, two weeks of togetherness and warm weather (not to mention good food and better company), make it all worth it. We are probably taking next year off but we’ll do it again – we’re a road tripping family. Hopefully I will have a vacation recap for you sometime soon… but in the meantime, assume we had a blast (because we did) and assume you would be jealous (because we’re awesome).