...Look Homeward, Angel...
For the most part, our summer has been busy but relatively uneventful. I mean, this time last year, we were at home with our newborn trying to figure out Parenthood; therefore, this year is relatively calm by comparison. However, some of our recent travels have lent themselves to absolute hilarity... or despair...and I would like to record them for posterity before my poor little mind begins to lose any of the delicious, delightful details.
We took Lucy on her first beach trip during the week of July 4th, and it was wonderful. She loved every minute of our time there as well as every droplet of ocean and tiny grain of sand. I could write about all of our blissful little outings and all the cute things she did, but that would make for one boring blog post. I know what you people want. You want the real nitty gritty of myfailings learning experiences as a Mom.
Well, for your reading pleasure:
Patrick's brother and his fiance (now wife!) were married in Cade's Cove, Tennessee last weekend. Some of the more avid hikers among you may know where that is, but, for the rest of you couch potatoes, it is a gorgeous area of the Smokey Mountain National Forest near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So the three of us packed up and headed that way last week. I'd never been to Gatlinburg, so I didn't really know what to expect, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the greater Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area is every child's dream and every parent's nightmare. I would have been in hog. heavennnnnnn. if we'd ever vacationed here when I was a child, hence the whole parental nightmare part. "Mommy, take me here! Daddy, buy me this!" Anyway, I digress.
Surprisingly, Lucy slept for the larger part of the four-ish hour trip up there, which is fortunate because Google Maps was smoking some serious crack once we got off the interstate and (needlessly) wound our way through one lane backroads of rural Tennessee. Thanks a lot, Siri. Way to have our back on that one...NOT. After we almost mowed down a couple of zealous pedestrians in downtown Gatlinburg (seriously, if you've ever been, you know what I mean), we made it to our hotel. While Patrick was checking us in, I heard Lucy begin to stir. Then I heard her shart, loud and clear. When Patrick got back into the car, I informed him that we'd need to do some damage control as soon as we got to our room. Before we even unloaded anything else from the car, we grabbed our daughter who had already unloaded everything she needed, and rushed her to the bathtub.
Then I set about the business of finding a place for Princess Poop to sleep for the next two nights. I called the front desk and was promptly informed that they were out of portable cribs AND pack-n-plays, one of which had been promised to me. Oh. Good. So after dinner that night, we began an adventure (unbeknownst to us) to find a pack-n-play at, where else, Wal-Mart. As we went into the store, a man who parked next to us flagged us down and said, "I noticed your back tire is a little low." We thanked him, thought nothing of it, and continued our mission. Well, wouldn'tchayknowit, Wal-Mart was out of Pack-n-Plays. Like, totally. Defeated, we walked back out to our car where we discovered that our back tire was, in fact, a little low. Or a lot low. As in flat. Did I mention it was like 9:00 by this point? Well, it was like 9:00 by this point. I whipped out my AAA gold card and called those fools. As the AAA operator was giving me fifteen different confirmation numbers while telling me that the repair service would call me to confirm, a call beeped in. "Hey...hey...HEY, I'vegotanothercallcominginI'vegottogothanksBye!" I just knew it would be a friendly mechanic who said he'd be there in five minutes. Wrong. It was the hotel. "I just wanted you to know that maintenance found a Pack n' Play!" I wasn't sure whether to be overjoyed that Lucy now had a place to sleep or really pissed off that we were sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Sevierville, TN with a flat tire because we were in pursuit of a Pack n' Play in the first place.
...
As time passed, Lucy turned into tired, angry baby. So I called those AAA fools back. "Hi, it's now 9:45, and I'm in a Wal-Mart parking lot with a one year old. Can you please tell me when I may get some help here?" The AAA service rep said, "Oh, it looks like someone marked that call as cancelled!"
We took Lucy on her first beach trip during the week of July 4th, and it was wonderful. She loved every minute of our time there as well as every droplet of ocean and tiny grain of sand. I could write about all of our blissful little outings and all the cute things she did, but that would make for one boring blog post. I know what you people want. You want the real nitty gritty of my
Well, for your reading pleasure:
Patrick's brother and his fiance (now wife!) were married in Cade's Cove, Tennessee last weekend. Some of the more avid hikers among you may know where that is, but, for the rest of you couch potatoes, it is a gorgeous area of the Smokey Mountain National Forest near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. So the three of us packed up and headed that way last week. I'd never been to Gatlinburg, so I didn't really know what to expect, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the greater Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge area is every child's dream and every parent's nightmare. I would have been in hog. heavennnnnnn. if we'd ever vacationed here when I was a child, hence the whole parental nightmare part. "Mommy, take me here! Daddy, buy me this!" Anyway, I digress.
Surprisingly, Lucy slept for the larger part of the four-ish hour trip up there, which is fortunate because Google Maps was smoking some serious crack once we got off the interstate and (needlessly) wound our way through one lane backroads of rural Tennessee. Thanks a lot, Siri. Way to have our back on that one...NOT. After we almost mowed down a couple of zealous pedestrians in downtown Gatlinburg (seriously, if you've ever been, you know what I mean), we made it to our hotel. While Patrick was checking us in, I heard Lucy begin to stir. Then I heard her shart, loud and clear. When Patrick got back into the car, I informed him that we'd need to do some damage control as soon as we got to our room. Before we even unloaded anything else from the car, we grabbed our daughter who had already unloaded everything she needed, and rushed her to the bathtub.
Then I set about the business of finding a place for Princess Poop to sleep for the next two nights. I called the front desk and was promptly informed that they were out of portable cribs AND pack-n-plays, one of which had been promised to me. Oh. Good. So after dinner that night, we began an adventure (unbeknownst to us) to find a pack-n-play at, where else, Wal-Mart. As we went into the store, a man who parked next to us flagged us down and said, "I noticed your back tire is a little low." We thanked him, thought nothing of it, and continued our mission. Well, wouldn'tchayknowit, Wal-Mart was out of Pack-n-Plays. Like, totally. Defeated, we walked back out to our car where we discovered that our back tire was, in fact, a little low. Or a lot low. As in flat. Did I mention it was like 9:00 by this point? Well, it was like 9:00 by this point. I whipped out my AAA gold card and called those fools. As the AAA operator was giving me fifteen different confirmation numbers while telling me that the repair service would call me to confirm, a call beeped in. "Hey...hey...HEY, I'vegotanothercallcominginI'vegottogothanksBye!" I just knew it would be a friendly mechanic who said he'd be there in five minutes. Wrong. It was the hotel. "I just wanted you to know that maintenance found a Pack n' Play!" I wasn't sure whether to be overjoyed that Lucy now had a place to sleep or really pissed off that we were sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Sevierville, TN with a flat tire because we were in pursuit of a Pack n' Play in the first place.
...
As time passed, Lucy turned into tired, angry baby. So I called those AAA fools back. "Hi, it's now 9:45, and I'm in a Wal-Mart parking lot with a one year old. Can you please tell me when I may get some help here?" The AAA service rep said, "Oh, it looks like someone marked that call as cancelled!"
Could you, like, I dunno, UN-Cancel it for me? Actually, I didn't say that. I just bit my lower lip to stop myself from completely losing my $&*# right then and there. "Stay on the phone, and I'll get in touch with someone immediately." I already liked this fool way better than the last fool I talked to. After a few short moments, she returned to the phone and said that someone would be out in ten minutes. Sure enough, ten minutes later, a beautiful, shiny black wrecker came to our rescue right there in Aisle 8. The mechanic was actually very friendly (PTL), and he pulled a giant nail out of our tire which I'm thinking of goldleafing and turning in to a sentimental Christmas ornament. He patched our tire in about ten minutes, which would've been more like five if the people around us would not have been asking him when he was going to be finished because they needed to get their cars out.
We finally made it back to the hotel, where our pack-n-play was waiting, around 10:30 P.M. You know, the optimal bedtime for a one year old.
***
Patrick goes back to work next week, and he's basically been working all summer (for free) to boot, so we decided to take an overnight vacay to Asheville, and it was...memorable. Again, Lucy slept for the bulk of the drive up, so she seemed rested and ready to explore the town for a couple of hours. We strolled her around downtown for about an hour, and then we decided to stop for dinner at Tupelo Honey Cafe (a.k.a. the greatest restaurant currently in existence). We were seated outside, and everything seemed to be going swimmingly until our waiter very sweetly brought out three biscuits (because Lucy's like a real person, and I keep forgetting that). I began by pinching off bites of Lucy's biscuit and giving them to her, but she soon wanted to do that for herself. "Okay," I thought, "She's got to learn how to do this," so I put the biscuit in front of her. She did a good job for about 0.5 seconds until she grabbed the entire biscuit and tried to shove it in her mouth. I promptly took the biscuit away from her. It was then that all hell broke loose. She would not be placated by juice or by being offered more biscuit, oh no. She was going to scream as loudly as possible so that everyone in a ten mile radius knew that she was po'd. I sheepishly grabbed my child and scampered out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk, tail between my legs. "I can't be that mom. Not THAT mom. The one with the kid who won't quit screaming! The one that ruins everyone else's dinner!" The sidewalk did not amuse Lucy. She kept screaming as I stared longingly from afar at my delicious vegetable plate now sitting on our table. "Ask for boxes," I mouthed through the partition to Patrick. "What?!" "Ask for boxes!" "What!?!" "BOXES. BOX-ES." "Huh?" "TO-GO. TO. GO." "Oh, okay." When Patrick finished, he came and relieved me of Lucy duty, and I hurried back into the patio to scarf down a little bit of my now-cold dinner and pay our bill. As I scraped the contents of my plate into the to-go boxes, an older lady sitting near us got up to leave and kindly said, "Don't worry. You'll be able to eat dinner together again one day. I was reliving the past watching you, but, trust me, it does get better." Lucy screamed all the way to the car, all the way to the hotel, and all the way to our room. She finally calmed down when I got her a bottle (which she hasn't taken at night in over a month, so go figure). She then promptly let out a gigantic fart and was her happy-go-lucky self for the rest of the night. Atta' girl.
...
One of the places I absolutely wanted to visit in Asheville was Riverside Cemetery to see the graves of Thomas Wolfe and O.Henry. As we wound our way through the cemetery in search of these great authors, we heard a terrifying yet familiar sound: the oozy bubbling of shart. Within moments, our nostrils were assaulted by a pungent odor, and we knew it was bad. "Pull over." "Where?" "I don't know! Pull over! I've got to change her diaper NOW!" Among the quiet beauty of this old cemetery, I lifted my daughter out of her carseat, and cried out in anguish, "OHMIGAH, it's on the carseat!" Patrick immediately rushed around and held Lucy at arms length (in the rain because of course it was raining by now, OF COURSE) as I scraped doodie off her plush, pink car seat. I reached to unsnap her romper, and my hand recoiled in horror. "IT'S ON MY HAND! OH GOD, IT'S ON MY HAND!" We attempted to pull her romper off of her with the least amount of damage done, but there was poop everywhere. Every. Where. I had to wipe her torso before we even took her diaper off. We finally got her cleaned up enough to tackle the real mess. I flung the overworked diaper to the ground in front of the graves of some poor family, and my daughter stood there, naked except for her shoes, within eye sight of O.Henry's grave. In the rain. Just as happy as you please. Babbling away. I managed to adequately clean my child at the expense of an entire travel pack of wipes, and I tucked her, newly clothed, onto a towel atop her soggy carseat. Patrick had gotten a plastic bag and un-defiled the graves around us, and he asked, "What should we do with her romper?" "We're throwing that thing away!" "But I love it! It's so cute!" "There ain't no saving that thing." So we deposited our package in the nearest trash can, our parting gift to Thomas Wolfe and co.
After the past two weeks, I can say with unabashed certainty: There's no place like home.
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