Road Trip

We're home! Oh, the joys of sleeping in your own bed after a week-end away. Oh, the joys of having your children sleep - period - after a week-end away.

There was a family function to attend in La Belle Province. Since hubby is running short on vacation time, we decided to save his few remaining vacation days for - well - his vacation. So, my sister and I loaded our children into my car and hit the road. Her teenage son (we'll refer to him as 'SuperStar') preferred to stay home. Gee, I wonder why. "Stay home with my girlfriend and buddies, or spend seven hours in a car with my kid sister to go visit my grandparents where I'll have to listen to lame jokes about my piercings and share the computer with at least ten other people." Choice? What choice? So he was left for two days with a set of rules a mile long, and all the neighbours, as well as his uncle, popping in to check on him when he least expected it.

The ride there was nothing short of heavenly. Three children crammed into the back seat - Mini-Me in his booster, Trouble in his car seat, and my niece (let's name her 'Butterfly') stuffed into the two-inch space between them. You'd think this was a recipe for disaster. Hubby and I had learned from our last road trip, though, that two children plus one set of headphones for the DVD player equals straightjackets for Mom and Dad. So we had bought an extra set of headphones for Trouble. Butterfly had her own personal DVD player which my sister had bought during their last road trip (no doubt having suffered through the same lesson we had just benefitted from). So the ride there was made in relative peace. When anyone asked me how the ride was, I boasted expansively about how wonderful those headphones were, the best investment I've made in years, we didn't hear anything out of the kids during the whole trip, yadda, yadda, yadda... Did you hear that? That would be the sound of Fate laughing long and hard at my boasting. She was gonna teach me a lesson, but good.

Night number one was spent at my brother's house. His two children are close in age to Butterfly and Mini-Me, and so they always have fun together. And a great time was had by all. Bed time rolled around, so we set the kids up on the living room floor with a pair of inflatable mattresses - boys on one, girls on the other.

I slept in my niece's bed with Trouble. I learned two things that night. One: For such a little guy, Trouble takes up a surprisingly large amount of space in bed. Two: He leads with his head. He doesn't just flip and flop and toss and turn. He points his head in the direction he wants to go, and then gives an almighty heave with his freakishly strong little legs. I slept very little that night, as Trouble brought back fond memories of my pregnancy with him, where he would plant his skull in one of my kidneys and dig in with all his might.

As if Trouble wasn't giving me a hard enough time, Mini-Me decided to take a few years off my life. When I went for my middle-of-the-night-pee, I decided to look in on the kids in the living room. There were the two girls, but where were the boys? I checked my nephew's bedroom. OK, there's my nephew, but where's my son? Back to the living room - nope definitely not there. Maybe he snuck into my bed during the fifteen minutes I was sleeping? Nope, not there, either. Full blown panic has now struck. In my mind, I'm having visions on Mini-Me suddenly developing a sleep-walking habit, and he's now wandering around the streets of a strange neighbourhood in his Hulk pyjamas. I bolt down to the basement to wake my sister. Hang on, there's an extra lump in her bed. There's my son, snuggled in next to his aunt. OK, I can breathe again. My sister had woken up at this point, so I asked her why he was there. "Why didn't he want to come to bed with me?" asks the hurt little voice inside my head. "Oh, he said he didn't want to sleep up there. The girls were making too much noise."

Of course, he was right. By the time I got back to bed, there was no way I was getting to sleep. For I was now painfully aware of a fact about inflatable mattresses of which I had previously been blissfully unaware. Every time one of the girls would roll over or shift positions, the mattress would emit sounds that made me think someone was building six foot tall balloon animals in the living room. Fabulous. Two hours of sleep after a seven hour drive. No problem. I can catch up on my sleep the next night, right?

Not so much. Night number two was spent at my parents' house on the inflatable mattress with both Mini-Me and Trouble, and a cousin on the sofa next to us who is a self-proclaimed 'violent sleep kicker'. One of the many downfalls of sleeping on the living room floor is that you have to wait until everyone else in the house goes to bed before you can do the same. This happened around midnight. I settled in with Mini-Me on the outside edge, Trouble in the middle and me taking the perilous spot mere inches from the violent sleep kicker. Around three o'clock in the morning, I discovered that Trouble doesn't enjoy sleeping in the middle. He really needs his space after all. He woke up crying loudly, and no amount of cooing or shushing from me would get him to calm down. So I picked him up and cuddled with him in an armchair. He fell immediately and deeply back to sleep. Great. I can't stay in this armchair all night, though, so now what? I gingerly place Trouble back on the inflatable mattress, where he rearranged himself into a suitably sprawled position, and didn't wake up again.

Well, that was good for him, but there wasn't room for me anymore. I tried in vain to attain a comfortable sleeping position in that armchair. I gave that up for a bad idea after the first half hour. I thought I'd try to sprawl across the foot of the air mattress. This would have worked, except that my legs from the knee downwards had no mattress underneath them. Add to that the fact that air mattresses are very much like waterbeds without a frame. If you move a fraction of an inch, everyone else on the bed goes for a trampoline ride. And, if you lie too close to the edge, the air in the mattress rolls out from underneath you and you get tossed rather unceremoniously off the bed.

As I clung precariously to my little corner of the bed, it never occurred to me that the mattress had, in fact, three other sides. At about four o'clock that morning, there was a loud 'ker-THUMP!' Mini-Me had learned the perils of rolling too closely to the edge of the treacherous air mattress. He was fine - had, in fact, jumped right up and climbed back into bed on his own without even waking up. I really didn't want a repeat performance, though, so I spent what was left of the night with one arm and one leg out at ninety degree angles, trying to keep Mini-Me and Trouble from rolling off the bed again.

So, a seven hour drive followed by two hours of sleep, followed by a party, another three hours of sleep, and another seven hour drive. The icing on the cake was my alarm going off at seven o'clock this morning so I could get Mini-Me off to school. The real kicker? As I protested weakly and pounded on my snooze button, Mini-me bounced out of bed, got himself dressed, and poured his own bowl of cereal and milk. Trouble woke up shortly thereafter, actually singing. *Sigh!* There went any hopes I had of lying comatose until noon.

Technorati Tags: Road Trip ; Parenthood ; Sleep ; Air Mattress ; Travelling ; Children