Last weekend we traveled to North Carolina to see my sister-in-law and her husband who are stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville. This is about a 6 hour ride from our house so Jay and I decided to leave at about 7pm after the kids had been fed and bathed and put in their pajamas.
The idea was that as it got dark, they would fall asleep and we'd get to enjoy adult conversation in the middle of the night as our sweet children slept in the back seat. This is not what happened.
Our daughter was very chatty until about 8:30, which kept her brother awake. He finally fell asleep about that time, but she unfortunately began moaning and keening about how she couldn't put her head down. She was pitiful and loud and it was pretty horrible.
We were in the middle of nowhere and there wasn't a hotel I felt like we could stay in. I will admit that I am a bit of a hotel snob, but really, there wasn't anything in sight for miles. She finally fell asleep about 9:30, but woke up again at 10:30. At 11:30pm we finally found a hotel and we rounded up the kids and enough stuff to stay the night.
She fell promptly asleep but our son, delighted to be awake in the middle of the night, began jumping up and down on the bed and throwing pillows onto the floor. We woke up exhausted, 2 hours from our destination, and 120 dollars poorer.
We had an absolutely wonderful time seeing Julie and Christian and I'll share some pictures later---once they're uploaded from the camera and phones we took them on.
Our ride home took 10 hours, involved several torrential downpours, an entire closed freeway that we had used four days earlier (and added 40 miles to the trip), and unexplained stop-and-go traffic on I-85.
We were so tired of traveling that we stopped at my parents' house 30 minutes from our own home just so we could have dinner and bathe the kids and get the hell out of the car.
It takes a lot for me to abandon my plans, but motherhood is definitely trying to get me to change that personality trait.
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