If I visited you when we traveled North last month, you never have to question how much I care for you. The trip looked impossible on paper, but I missed our friends and family too much to let the details deter me. Over the course of 12 days we traveled 18 hours to Cincinnati (not including what felt like 8 hours worth of potty stops), eventually dropped Billy off at the airport and drove an hour to Oxford, then 2 hours to Columbus, then 4 hours to Elkins, then 10,000 miles home.
My dad has always been ready to help me in extraordinary ways, but his insistence on joining the boys and me on our drive back was one of the most generous things he's ever done. The trip was... tough. As we rolled into Memphis after 16 hours on the road, our minivan looked like the scene of a crime, I was ready to turn myself in for child abuse, and I think my dad had to hold back tears when I told him we were only a little more than halfway home. It was my turn to hold back tears when my dad guiltily hugged us goodnight and shut the door to our adjoining rooms. I looked at the boys, who were acting out some kind of Lord of the Flies thing in the bathroom, and realized that after napping on an off all day they weren't going to sleep a wink. Somehow I got us all settled into one of the double beds a couple hours later, and I was still acting as a human shield as they happily wrestled off to sleep at midnight. At 3:30 Jimmy suddenly sat straight up in bed, leaned over, and slugged Charlie in the face. I think he didn't realize the fighting had ceased a few hours earlier.
The next day, after suffering through a tantrum-filled continental breakfast, my dad drove through 10 hours of pounding rain and even steered us skillfully past a truck that spun out right in front of us. Instead of celebrating our arrival in Fort Worth by catching the first flight home, my dad stayed in Texas three more days and helped me try to mold my disoriented and increasingly unstable children back into decently-behaved little boys.
As expected, my memories of the drive have softened already, and as I think about the wonderful visits I had with each of my dear friends and family members, I'm (almost) ready to do it all over again.
PS: Please note the lack of photos after the first leg of the trip. It's clear when we went into survival mode.
PPS: The second batch of photos are from Charlie's 4th birthday. Poor Jimmy didn't believe that he once had a birthday too, and he pretty much felt that December 6th is "torture by jealousy" day.
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