I think I know what my personal hell might be…
Shane and I took the kids (including bulldog Ringo) up to our family lake home on the North Shore last weekend. The weather was perfect and we all had a wonderful time. We had fun outings to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum and Duluth Children’s Museum, and went on beautiful walks at Gooseberry Falls and the Two Harbors lighthouse lake walk. We had lunch at the local favorite, Betty’s Pies, and Shane and I also had a fabulous dinner at the New Scenic Cafe. All the kids took decent naps and slept fairly well at night. We even saw a “mommy dear and bambi” right up close! Sounds like heaven, right?! Where does the hell come in, you ask? … … the car ride home.
I’m usually VERY strategic when it comes to things like long car rides with the kids. I try to cover all my bases: play like crazy, eat until tummies are full, fresh diapers and comfy clothes on each child, and leave right before nap time. Well, for the first time in my life as a mother, I went out on a limb and left Two Harbors 1) on a freakin’ Sunday after the busiest weekend I’ve ever seen up north, 2) at a completely random time of day: 5:15pm, and 3) after we’d been warned of very heavy construction traffic. HUGE HUGE mistake. I should’ve trusted my instincts and stayed one more night.
We were about 20 minutes into our drive when we hit the first bout of traffic outside Duluth. Major road construction diverted all the weekend traffic to a measly traffic light, which also happened to be a left-turn. I could’ve walked through Duluth faster. Ugh. The babies most likely would’ve slept, but they didn’t appreciate the stop and go, so they got incredibly feisty…fussing and crying are understatements. So, what should’ve taken us 25 minutes took us about an hour and 15 minutes. That meant we still had a 2.5-hour drive ahead of us. Arg. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve stayed another night!
So, after we went through all the “down to one lane” construction through Duluth, I thought we were in the clear. I guess I forgot about the other “down to one lane” construction about 30 minutes past Duluth. The babies had FINALLY fallen asleep and Linnea was content watching a movie…and then we hit dead stopped traffic AGAIN! I just waited to hear the first squeal come from the back of the minivan, and it took about 3 minutes. Oh man. I’m pretty sure I tried everything at that point to make the car ride go more smoothly. I gave the babies bottles, fed them Cheerios, made sure they didn’t have stinky diapers, played countless rounds of peek-a-boo, and handed out every toy in the car. When it came down to it, though, there was really nothing I could do. If we stopped, we’d only add more time on the road, and I wasn’t going to pull a Britney Spears by taking my babies out of their car seats while we were driving. We just had to suffer on down the road. *sigh*
Long story short: what is typically a 3-hour drive took us 4.5 hours, and we didn’t get home until 9:30pm. Thank GOD Linnea is such a remarkable child and she didn’t cause much added stress to the ride home. She mostly just sat quietly in her seat and tried to ignore the babies. She even laughed at me when I got stuck between seats on my way back and forth to the babies. So, there you have it… a ridiculous car ride with screaming babies is my current personal hell. I’ll let you know if anything changes.
