SRMM's Excellent Adventure: Road Trip Update and I Heart Tennessee

Possibly, I have been driving forevah.  We've been on the road travelling for the last three weeks.  For most of that time, I was on my own with the kids, driving and hauling duffel bags myself.  Without realizing it I developed a tension knot in my right shoulder that gives me a foreshadowing of what my arthritic old age will feel like.

However, this last part of the trip is significantly more fun because my husband, the Absent-Minded Professor, is with me. When the kids and I picked him up at Philadelphia Airport last Saturday morning, I felt the tension start to drift out of my shoulders.  Two weeks of being in charge 24/7 is enough for me.

Now that we're headed back to Texas, he does the lion's share of the driving, and I'm free to obsessively check Facebook and Twitter relax a bit.  Partly because there's two parents this time, this leg of the trip is going pretty well.  Deprived of most of his Legos (we only have a small backpack full of them, and we don't let him bring them to dinner), Little Dude has discovered a new talent: stacking those little round creamer containers.  He's becoming the I.M. Pei of creamers.  Last night he could barely focus on dinner because the table had flavored creamers in different colors.  He stacked them up symmetrically and then couldn't get the pattern to work out.  He. blew. a. gasket.  It was a lying-on-the-floor, moaning, wailing freak-out. 

I knelt down next to him and calmly explained that he could choose to sit at the table, in which case he could have ice cream for dessert, or he could choose to continue to freak out, in which case I would carry him back to our room with no dessert.  Little Dude mustered all his emotional resources to pull it together because he loves vanilla ice cream with his very soul. 

I knew they had vanilla ice cream because we stayed at this very same hotel last fall during the Great Swine Flu Debacle of 2009.  This was the hotel we stayed in just before things got ugly.  I vividly remember our lovely dinner (kids eat free!) and the paper cups of vanilla-flavored frozen non-dairy dessert treat they served for dessert.

The thing is, restaurants sometimes change their menus.  Or they run out of things.  Or waiters get pissed off because Little Dude touched every single creamer on the table and then had a spazz on the floor.  Whatever.  The point is: No ice cream for Little Dude.

You know what Little Dude hates? Surprises.  You know what he hates more than surprises?  Bad surprises, which are often known as disappointments.  After Mommy said he could have it, after he had gotten his tantrum under control in order to have it, the absence of vanilla ice cream was a spirit-crushing disappointment that made him doubt the existence of anything good in the universe.

That was a rough evening.

Today was a little better.  The only hiccup was that I had to change Little Dude's diaper in the van outside a Burger King in Cleveland, TN.  We parked right in front of the door, and I ended up having to change him lying in the front seat of the van.  (Little Dude has always been terrified of the fold-down changing tables they have in public bathrooms.  Also, I think he may have exceeded the weight limit for those things about a year ago.) 

To my fellow BK diners, I am so sorry about the view.  I'd like to say, however, that the people of Tennessee are seriously the nicest people anywhere.  An elderly couple actually could not get into their car, because I was blocking their door with my whole diaper production.  Instead of being horrified that I was changing my giant four-year-old boy in full view of a restaurant, or being pissed that I was keeping them from getting to their bingo game, the elderly gentleman just smiled at me and said, "take your time."

Have I mentioned my love for the people of Tennessee?  They are crazy nice here.  Is it because it's nice and warm here all the time without getting ridiculously hot?  Is it because the barbecue is so good?  Is it because of all the Little Debbie outlet stores? Or did you all just have a meeting and decide to be friendly all the time, even to strangers who do impossibly rude things like block your car door with a stinky diaper change operation?