A Smattering of Duehrings

Damon gave a little run down of the trip, but for memory sake and for those who like the little details of our lives I will tell my story.

We get up Tuesday morning and are on the road by 9:00am. It had taken 12 hours to get to Alabama and I am counting on 12 hours to get home. I had hoped and prayed we would have our air conditioner for the trip home since it was 90 degrees down south. It works about 25% of the time.

First mistake…I tell Damon to switch the seating arrangement. I tell him to put the 3 boys across in the 3 seats directly behind us so they could watch dvd’s on our new dvd players that were strapped to the back of Damon and my seats. Maggie and Molly would get the back 2 seats.

We start up the van and the air conditioner WORKED! YAY! The dvd player does not work, however. We decide that we will not shut the van off the rest of the way home. There is something about the first start of the day that the air conditioner works. We will just fill the van with gas while it is still running.

About an hour into the trip we come to a complete stop on the interstate. After about a half hour of sitting there our van is almost out of gas and it is overheating. Damon waits until the temp is almost in the red before finally shutting off the air. Thats ok, we will just open the windows. Damon’s window goes down about an inch and freezes. It won’t go down and it won’t go up.

We wait another half hour and Molly is now looking pretty hot back in the back of the van and so we get desperate and call Travis to have him help us find an alternate route.(second mistake..we didn’t take an atlas) We see an exit ahead and this is our chance. We find another route and take the exit. As soon as we get off the interstate and onto the alternate route we find that approximately 1 million other people did the same thing and we were now an even worse traffic jam. We wait in that mess of traffic for about a half hour before turning around and going back to our original traffic jam on the interstate.

By the time we get to whatever was causing the traffic to stop, the accident had been taken away and we never see what it was. So, we drive until we find the next gas station. We fill our 17 gallon van with 17 gallons of gas. (That was a close one) We asked the kids who needed to potty and then we go on our way. About 15 minutes later we hit another dead stop traffic jam. Same story, second verse. This time however Micah and Evan both have to go to the potty. I suggest going in a bottle and they let me know its the other kind of potty. So, we are sitting in dead stop traffic with two boys crying cause they can’t hold it anymore.

This traffic jam let up after about a half hour and we find the nearest McDonalds so we could have 2 stalls at the same time. We are learning.

We now had lost 2 full hours of driving time and have only been on the road for about 3.5 hours. The kids are finally falling asleep. I think we had 3 that had just fallen asleep at this point which is a miracle for us. The problem is that Damon was falling asleep at the wheel, too. He kept nodding off and decided we had to pull over and put me in the drivers seat for awhile. I told him we had to make it quick or all the kids would wake up that just went to sleep. We pull off on an exit and quickly switch places. ALL the kids pop their heads up immediately to see if we are finally home.

Now Damon is taking his nap while 3 boys are fighting, talking to me, and asking me to get them things. Apparently, they don’t notice that I am now driving and can’t help them for awhile. I was about tired of the trip at this point.

We finally stop about half way home and decide we have to go into a restaurant to eat and let the kids out of the van for awhile. We turn off the van which is the end of our air conditioner for the trip.

The rest of the trip is kind of a blur. I remember that I was pretty grumpy. I remember that I had a kink in my neck from turning around a million times. I remember that I also had a slice in my neck from where the seat belt cut into my neck every time I turned around. I remember it taking me an hour to convince Evan that he could pee in a bottle again even after his last bad experience. I remember that around 10:00pm(after 13 hours on the road)the kids finally started falling asleep. I remember that Maggie and Molly were complete angels and didn’t make a peep the entire trip. I remember wishing I had given all the boys benedryl or sleeping pills before leaving. I remember pulling in the driveway at 11:00 and being so glad that we were finally home.

There! Now I will never forget. When we plan another long trip I will come back and read this post and cancel the trip. Well, except for the Colorado trip we are taking in 3 weeks.

• DVD player–broken
• Stand-still traffic jams–3
• Hours the A/C worked–4
• Hours the A/C would have worked had we not had to turn it off due to the van overheating in a traffic jam–6
• Hours we drove–13
• Number of windows that couldn’t roll down in the traffic jams to alleviate the high temperatures in the van–1 (out of 2 possible; the rest of the windows don’t roll down, they kind of swing out a little bit)
• Stops made before I finally remembered to tie down that loose strap that was slapping the roof and driving me insane–3
• Number of times a child had to desperately go to the bathroom 15 minutes after stopping somewhere so another child could go–2
• Meals ordered at Cracker Barrel that were not eaten by their recipients–2
• Number of times the boys fought due to boredom, cramped quarters, heat, lack of DVDs to watch, etc.–1 million
• Number of times a child asked Mommy for something–1 trillion
• Number of extended trips we will make in that van in the future–0

Dawn and I try and try to get pictures of the 3 babies together. They just won’t stay put. One of them always gets away before we can snap a picture. We have found that snack time is the only time they will stay still long enough. They all love to eat and they all want to drink from the cup the other one is drinking from so they keep passing their cups around.

Since Dawn just directed people to my blog for pictures I guess that I better put on some pictures. Damon just took the kids to the park and the babies are all sleeping so I have some time.

I have had a very difficult time getting pictures of the 3 babies together. They are all on the move all the time and at least Molly has learned to ignore the noises I make to try to get her to look at the camera. I get Mary and Elise to look at me all the time, but never Molly with them. We did catch one shot in the bathtub that was the closest we could get them together. Dawn may have had better luck than me with this. We will see.

Last night we put them on a blanket outside while the kids played. Mary sat on the blanket and didn’t move, but Elise and Molly were off and running. Eli sat on the blanket to play with Mary. Eli loves Mary and is always trying to play with her. He was reading her a book and playing peek-a-boo with her.

Yesterday morning during baby nap time I took the oldest 4 kids to a fun park that we went to last time we were here. It is huge and has tons of mazes, bridges, and tunnels to go through in what the kids call a castle. That is the same park that Damon took them back to this afternoon. They love it.

All the kids get to eat in the kitchen and us adults get to eat in another room. It is quite the table full of kids.

Here is the 3 little ones at snack time.

And the big kids playing outside on the slide

Molly has been loving hanging out with her daddy out on the porch swing.

I have had a few requests of people wanting to hear about our trip to Alabama. There really isn’t too much to tell, but that is a good thing.

I was right about the kids wanting to get in the van early on our departure day. Damon locked the van the night before and before 8:00 in the morning they were all out there peering through the windows trying to figure out why they couldn’t get in yet. The day went pretty good and I actually was able to pack and get the whole house clean before leaving. (I have a thing about having the house completely cleaned when we leave for trips.)

Anyway, the last thing I put in the van was the puke bucket. That was all it took for Micah to start feeling ill. He ran into the house crying that he thought he was going to get sick. I went in after him and found him laying down bundled up with a blanket on the couch. About 10 minutes later he thought he might be able to get back in the van for our trip. (He made it the whole trip without getting sick this time)

It took about 15 minutes after leaving before Evan asked if we were almost there. We hit rush hour so it took us a good hour to get out of town. We drove until 11:30 and stopped at a hotel for the night. Would you believe not a single one of the kids slept a wink the whole way to the hotel. We also didn’t have to make any bathroom stops which was nice. Molly did awesome. She just sat there sucking on her tongue and playing with her hair the whole way. (very weird how she does this but it sure keeps her quiet) She said “DaddEEE” about a million times, too. She loves her daddy. Eli asked about every 20 minutes where we were going. He also kept telling us he was ready to go home. The kids overall did much better than I would have ever thought possible.

We woke up Wednesday morning and continued on the trip. Everything went fine except for the air conditioner didn’t work right in our van. It was a hot day so it was a bit miserable. We just opened the windows. Going 70 mph with the windows open totally blocked out all of the noise from the kids which was kind of nice. Here is Evan trying to cool down by hanging out his window.

We made it here by about 3:30 and I felt like the trip went really fast. Damon didn’t agree with me, but I guess that was because he had to drive. :0)

We already have tons of pictures from our first day. That will be the next post.