I Wish I Was Making Up The Beaver Nuggets Part

We made the five six hour drive to The Ranch. It’s difficult to predict how long the drive will be, because of the stops. I’m writing the following down so I can remember to plan for these events next time.

We will see forty-six signs for a certain Texas truck stop, advertising their world-famous “beaver nuggets.” (Gag.) Stopping at this particular truck stop is quite the time-wasting adventure, because it involves a souvenir section, a six-foot-tall animatronic beaver, and a legless animatronic man in a cage that triggers a fight-or-flight response in my Aspergerish son.

At least one stop will be made to find food, because everyone’s sick of pretzels and Goldfish and Mommy my peanut butter sandwich is all squished.

We will need to make several stops for bathroom breaks. This is usually for me. I used to have a bladder of steel; however, four pairs of intrauterine feet have stomped my bladder to approximately the capacity of a shot glass. If the roads are bumpy it gets a little more dicey.

At least once per trip, we will also need to make a bathroom stop 20 minutes after the last bathroom stop, because someone who “tried,” now really, really, reeeeeeeally has to go. Now.

One child will develop the worst headache ever, and will dissolve into tears because no one is listening to her and would everyone please stop singing “Single Ladies.” So we will have to stop while Mommy rips through the bags in the trunk to look for children’s Tylenol. Mommy will accidentally say a curse word upon realizing that she has left that one bag at home on the dining room table, and then spend the next 30 seconds loudly saying “shoot, shoot, shoot” to try to fake out the kids. Then Mommy will have a sudden surge of hope that the car first aid kit might have some children’s Tylenol. It doesn’t.

The car first aid kit hasn’t been replenished in the last five years and now contains:

• one latex glove
• a pair of plastic tweezers
• a flat tube of goo that used to be antiseptic but now is just … septic
• one “adult strength” chewable aspirin in case Daddy has a heart attack when he finds out later how much money we spent on crap at the Little Shop of Animatronic Horrors

Mommy will give the sobbing child the “adult strength” chewable aspirin because those damn things used to be called baby aspirin until everybody freaked out about giving kids aspirin. (p.s. Aspirin kicks ass at taking away headaches. Ten minutes later that kid was fine and belting out “The Tide is High.”)

That’s a lot of stops. Add five minutes to the end of each stop to apply hand sanitizer and referee an argument about seating arrangements. Really, it’s amazing we can get anywhere. It’s probably a miracle that we can get from our house to the grocery store.

It’s all good, though. This is just a practice run. We are gearing up for the Big Trip later this summer, when I will drive the kids cross-country to visit friends in Pennsylvania. We did this once before, on the way out to Texas, but that trip got cut short when we all came down with swine flu in a Holiday Inn in Nashville. Good times … good times.