A 14-hour drive

Elise has started smiling for
the camera!

When there’s something Kalina or Elise does not want to do, each of them finds a way to avoid it. Kalina might complain about being too tired (“Well, then, Sweetie, we’d better put you down for a nap!”) or her hands being too full (since she’s lugging around 5-10 small animals at any given time). Elise, on the other hand, employs the more desperate measures of twisty squirms (if she’s annoyed at being so rudely carried away from her attempt to climb up on a pint-sized rocking chair and rock it while standing up, for instance) or her infamous screeches (if she’s ravenously hungry but would prefer something other than avocado).

But there was no wriggling out of this one. Nope, all of us were destined to endure an approximately 14-hour car ride over two days, along with all the stuff mentioned in the last post. So we might as well make it fun, right?

Was it fun? You be the judge.

We began on Saturday morning. Grandpa was to accompany us for the first 3-ish hours, and then take us on a short tour of some family history sites in Virginia, not far from the North Carolina border. Kalina and Matt piled into Grandpa’s car, while Elise and I followed. Elise immediately fell asleep, while Kalina snacked and helped the guys find cows and horses and such along the way.

It poured rain as we headed out, but we eventually made it to sunnier skies. Just as Kalina was learning that when we go “through the mountains,” we actually go on top of them, we stopped for lunch.

Which took an hour, by the time everyone had clean diapers and clothes (Kalina spilled some milk on herself) and such. But at least we were fed.

In the 1750s, my ancestors
rescued a woman who'd been
captured by Native Americans.
This sign marks the vicinity!

We then wound through the mountains and the stomping grounds of my ancestors (and by this time Matt was driving Elise while I rode with my dad and Kalina), a jaunt that was punctuated by the leaping of a white-tailed-deer directly in front of Grandpa’s car. Kalina couldn’t have been more delighted, and correctly pronounced it a doe. Grandpa quietly wondered if she’d have been as happy if it had gotten splattered all over the windshield.

All too soon, it was time to say goodbye to Grandpa, and for the four of us to forge off on our own. We were faced with several challenges:

1. Space. From my spot in the front seat (there wasn’t enough room for me to sit between the girls), I needed to access: Kalina’s bag of fun, Elise’s bag of fun, the big bag of snacks, the bag of books, the diaper bag, the DVD player, the DVDs and the audio CDs. A good mommy gives up all of her footroom to keep her kids happy. I spent most of the trip cross-legged in my seat.

2. Elise is not yet coordinated/well-behaved enough to eat from a snack cup. We’d rigged up a snack tray for her, but within five minutes of its first use she’d tipped it all over herself and spent the rest of that leg of the trip, until I could free it, with it in her face. This meant that either we’d need to stop every 2-ish hours for her to spend at least 20 minutes eating, or I’d have to hand her food from the front seat. You can guess which option we chose.

3. This is when it hit Kalina that we weren’t going to be going back “home.” (Home being a very nebulous term at this point—was the car now our home?) “Kalina misses Grandpa!” she said as we pulled away, much to our dismay. Why can’t our kids have emotional breakdowns when it’s more convenient?

I spent the first hour answering the kids’ whims. Snacks, drinks, dropped toys, cheering up—you name it. By the end of the hour, the kids were only marginally content and my neck was killing me. Outlook for the rest of the trip was not good, and I mentally tabulated the amount of Advil I’d need to get me through. When’s that Target trip again?

But then Elise fell asleep and I unleashed on Kalina one of her “move presents,” a Magna Doodle I'd found cheap in a pre-Christmas sale and had had stashed away ever since. All was forgiven between Mommy and Daughter as Kalina first doodled happily away by herself (during which time Matt and I may have actually conversed for the first time since probably the Monday prior), then erased all of my doodles for me (it turns out, Magna Doodles are fun for all ages!) then anthropomorphized the triangle and circle stamps, who were best friends, and spent the remaining time before supper telling me stories about their adventures together.

Our supper stop took an hour. We wondered why. The restaurant of choice was Subway, and we went in, we ate as fast as we possibly could, and we left. Maybe it was the fact that Elise needed two diaper changes during this time? And the restaurant didn’t have a changing table? But seriously—an hour? Would all our stops be like this?

The girls were less than happy to be back in the car after dinner, as was I, as was Matt. But we were determined to press on to our intended overnight stop, in hopes that the next day we’d make it into our new home with plenty of time to explore.

The next hour and a half passed relatively amiably, as now I was pulling out new (hand-me-down) toys for Elise every 10 minutes, and Kalina was still relatively well entertained by her Magna Doodle and a free book I dug out of the side pocket of my door and read to her over and over again. I continued to offer snacks on demand.

We finally reached our intended, but not reserved, hotel. Before Matt could say anything, I hopped out of the car at the hotel entrance. “I’ll-go-get-us-a-room-you-watch-the-kids!” I sputtered before he could protest (much) as I ran into the hotel. After all, I’m every bit as capable of booking a room as he is, right?

Except the hotel only had a room with a single king bed in it left. And we really wanted two beds, so we could all be off the floor and away from the bugs. I’d failed. Worse, Elise missed me the entire time I was gone, and was not afraid to let everyone in the surrounding area know.

At the next hotel, Matt was the one to go inside. I got out with Elise and let her play with some potted flowers. And there was good news—they had a room for us! Matt busily loaded a cart with whichever pieces of his luggage he thought we needed and I headed up to the room with the kids.

Which was locked from the inside, so we headed back down again to the front desk. No problem! They had another room. I called out its number to Matt, who was still unloading and rearranging luggage, and went to check it out.

This one had the beds tipped up against the wall. Back downstairs we went. By this time, Kalina decided it was a fun game and was happily working the elevator for me.

Did I mention it was now almost an hour past Elise’s bedtime? You want to stress me out? You make my kid miss bedtime.

The next room was not made up. At this point, Matt called me out to the parking lot to see what all the fuss was about. I assured him that the hotel seemed good enough, and even the messy room was a clean kind of messy. In short, we were not getting back in the car again tonight if at all possible.

The fourth room was perfect, or would’ve been 20 minutes earlier. I suspiciously pulled back sheets and scoped out the bathroom, but everything seemed clean and in order. Matt arrived shortly afterward with his first load of stuff. It included everything Matt and I needed to put ourselves down for bed, as well as Kalina’s toothbrush, toothpaste and potty seat. Elise, who needed bedtime most of all, had nothing she needed.

I put Kalina on the toilet and brushed my own teeth and twiddled my thumbs as Matt went after another load. This one contained Kalina’s pajamas and Elise’s blanket and teddy bear, but no pack and play, pajamas, nighttime diaper, sound machine, or storybook for Kalina.

This time I went down to the car. I forgot the key and had to come back up. But…shortly thereafter, I’d acquired all the supplies we needed to put both kids to bed.

I’d been wondering this whole time how you actually get two squirrely kids to settle down to sleep when they’re in the same room. Won’t they keep each other up with their whining/crying/laughing? I suppose it helped that bedtime was 1 ½ to 2 hours overdue for each of them. At any rate, even though Elise seemed a bit confused about what was actually going on (her head kept popping up over the pack and play, which was about six inches from my face), and Kalina spent a good 10 minutes apparently burrowing into a little nest by the sounds of things, both fell asleep around 9:30 without much fuss. And soon after, so did Matt and I.

In the middle of the night, by the way, I noticed that Kalina was actually sleeping sideways on the bed. But she was sleeping!

We all did pretty well, actually, until the alarm, which we did not set, woke three of us at 5:45 the next morning. Which didn’t come as too much of a surprise as this is when Elise had been waking up, anyway, but we were still a bit disappointed. We hung out in the bathroom for a little while until Kalina woke a little after 6:00.

The next day’s drive at least had the benefit of taking us to our new house. Although this thought put some wind in my sails, it did nothing to improve our three-year-old’s mood, as she was now certain that returning to the old house with solve all her problems. I pulled out some sticker books to help cheer her up, as Elise took a nice snooze.

Our only stop was for lunch, and it took an hour. And after lunch, the blessed event we’d been waiting the whole trip for finally happened—both girls napped at the same time! For at least an hour! I spent the time doodling on Kalina’s Magna Doodle, and discussing with Matt the possibility of doing another long car trip at some point.

And then both girls woke up, and we had some car snacks, and just as Kalina was demanding I tell her yet another story about her kittens (and believe me, this topic had been more than exhausted already—plus, whenever I tell stories I seem to get everything wrong according to Kalina), the St. Louis Arch appeared in the distance.

“Look, Kalina, the Arch!” I practically shouted. “Let’s talk about something other than kittens for a while,” I didn’t say. I also handed Elise yet another new-ish toy so that I could help Matt navigate through the city.

And not too much longer, we were pulling into the driveway of our new home.

Our first meal in our new home! The
previous owners were kind enough to
leave the stools, which we're still
sitting on for all meals. (Elise was eating
all meals in her stroller at this point
because there was literally nowhere else.)

Our new home! In a much better mood than this morning, thanks to her nap, Kalina zoomed inside and began to eagerly explore. She was elated with her new, pink room, and also with the basement and the wide open spaces to run around in.

Elise, for her part, was just glad to be able to crawl more than six feet without having to be removed from anything dangerous.

Matt busily scoped out every corner and emptied the car (our stuff took up an impressive amount of the living room), and I actually made it to Target a day early.

For several days (okay, even once today) Kalina and I both occasionally got lost in the new house, which felt massive compared to our little “old” one (which is actually newer than our new one—does that make sense?). But would it still feel big when our stuff arrived? And would it begin to feel like “home," even to the three-year-old?

To be continued…