Aw, yeah!

Hi! Don't you love how I swear that I'm back to blogging and then don't post for two weeks? Time keeps slip-sliding away, but the main reason is that I was on *vacation.* Woo hoo, right? There were good, bad, and ugly parts, just like any old fashioned family vacation. The good: time with family, spending time in, near, and on the water, reading books (for fun!), eating good food, and having absolutely no responsibilities, pagers, emails, or Internet access. The bad: family overkill, NO AC in our rental (and 90 degree temps, if you know me, you know how disastrous this was), mosquitoes the size of my pinky finger (and a blue million mosquito bites), not really having anything to *do*, eating way too much good food, and no Internet access. The ugly: 23 hours in the car (each way!), with a 6 and almost 3 year-old. Yes, you read correctly, a total of 4 of my vacation days were spent driving in the car, with my whiny, don't- know-how-great-they-have-it children, slowly going insane. I believe that the first "Are we there yet?" came about 17 minutes into the trip, so yeah. Fun times.

The hilarious thing is, Mr. Whoo and I were crazy enough to make this trip about 5 years ago, with our just over one year old, and swore we would never do it again. HAHAHA! See how time dulls the sense of abject horror? Well, time, and over $400 per person for plane tickets. The first time around, CindyLou was just a little over one year old, and, while we had a DVD player (the makeshift kind that would hang in between the front seats and plugged into the cigarette lighter), CindyLou had the attention span of a gnat, and would only watch *one* of the many DVDs we had brought for her pacification, er, viewing pleasure. Any other of the videos made her bored, or scream, so we lucky people in the front seat got to listen to Ses.ame Stre.et "Sing Along" approximately 4872 times. The first couple of times, it was cute. We sang along with the songs and giggled at CindyLou's response. The next few times, we grinned and bore it. The next 100 times after that we started making up rude lyrics to the songs and commenting the actors "Mystery Science Theater 3000"-style. Any time after that, we just became hysterical and delirious. Seriously, this 30 minute video was the funniest sh*t we had ever heard. To this day we have quotations from that show (both real and altered) that we use in every day life, including a very enthusiastic "Aw, Yeah!" which came from an owl-type character in one of the songs. At the end of that trip, we (for some reason) kept the DVD, but did not watch it again for 5 whole years (mostly because we could recite it by rote)....until this trip.

We were a good 6 hours into the first day of traveling in the car, the novelty had worn off, and the kids were no longer interested in the snacks, our conversations, or the scenery. We were each "taking turns" choosing movies or music, when CindyLou and Bean just could not agree on a form of entertainment. The situation was devolving, and no amount of Capr.i S.un or Gold.fish could keep our offspring from complaining about one another when Mr. Whoo suddenly got this evil smile on his face, looked at me, and mouthed "Sing Along." My response? "Aw, YEAH!" So we played it. Bean was enthralled, CindyLou was still enthralled, and Mr. Whoo and I were laughing so hard we cried. The rest of the trip, we tried to engage the kids in the old standards such as the "Billboard Alphabet" game, the "License Plate" game, and "I Spy." We tried to give them a little taste of what it was like to travel back in the dark ages before DVD players, iPods, and Ninten.do DS. I'm not sure how much they appreciate it now, but hopefully, in time, they will. It is funny how the things that drive you the most insane are sometimes the best memories that you have. So family vacations, gotta love them. Now I am back in the fray, and just waiting for the next extraordinary happening in an ordinary day. Aw, yeah!