Road trip baby

Everything became a telephone, even her foot.  Michael admired her flexibility and had to capture it for posterity.

Going into the road trip, I thought that probably our biggest difficulty would be Tess in the car.  It turns out that either I’m good at predicting my children, or I had a self-fulfilling prophecy on my hands.  Keeping Tess entertained and happy challenged us at times.  I’m not really complaining, because even the difficulties we had weren’t that difficult. 

It definitely helped that we visited our friends on the way, so we drove a day, spent two nights with friends, and then drove on.  On the way back, we followed the same plan.  Our friends were very welcoming and hospitable, and had kids (including a baby, Tess’s favorite), so their home was kid-friendly and had toys in it, besides the human entertainment.  They also had a couple of cats, a couple of lambs, and cows in the fields next door.  These interesting points helped Tess forget the long hours in the car the day before, when her parents, for reasons that nobody sane could ever understand, strapped her in and wouldn’t stop every 15 minutes. 

Snacks were often served in plastic cups.  An unfortunate possibility is that Tess may have learned that boredom can be solved by eating potato chips.  Perhaps she’ll unlearn this again before long, since we rarely have potato chips.

Luckily for us, Tess enjoys music.  She doesn’t prefer CDs, though, she prefers live music, sung by her family for her.  This means that, during her tired times, her family spent lots of time singing Clementine, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Roll on Columbia, John Henry, America the Beautiful, Immaculate Mary, Battle Hymn of the Republic, and rounds of One Bottle of Pop, Jubilate Deo, and My Paddle’s Keen and Bright.  I’m sure we sang more.  Oh!  Of course:  Happy Birthday, one of Tess’s all-time favorites.  As well as Old MacDonald and I Love my Rooster.

Old sunglasses of Mama’s provide entertainment for the long haul.

This brought back many memories for me, since when I was a child, we took lots of road trips. This happened before 6-CD-changers in the car, so we’d alternate between singing songs as a family, reading, and complaining that someone was in our space.  The good ol’ days.  It turns out, though, that I haven’t passed on some of the songs that we always sang on road trips, so I had to either sing them myself or skip them. I did share the Kingston Trio’s song Tijuana Jail.  Michael found that amusing for some reason.  I also sang Charlie and the MTA, which they’d heard before, but it turns out that Naomi finds it depressing.  I decided not to move on to Tom Dooley or Bad Man’s Blunder.  My dad was a fan of the Kingston Trio, and I guess I didn’t ask quite as many questions about song lyrics as a kid as my kids do. 

Tess learned the words elk, bison, moose, marmot, waterfall, and rainbow on this trip.  We turned her seat around so that she could see out the window when we passed by wildlife.  When asked, “Can you see the _____________ [fill in wildlife or natural wonder], Tessie?”  she would almost always reply, with appropriate awe in her voice, “Oh, yeah!”  Ridiculously cute. 

Nature provides the opportunity to learn “waterfall” and “rainbow” in one stop.

Tess spent some time in the Ergo on Michael’s back on hikes and on boardwalks through the geothermal areas.  She didn’t appreciate this much, at least not when we first put her in.  But then she’d get into the walk and look at stuff or sing with Michael and be fine for a while. 

   Geysers still look cool from the Ergo.

Even though she sometimes complained about certain aspects of the trip, others she enthusiastically embraced.  She never objected to wearing a hat when necessary.

She ate well and didn’t fuss at the various places we stopped for food – rest stops, restaurants, picnic spots by the side of the road.     

Another favorite activity she developed was Swap the Bahdoo-Bahdoo.  Bahdoo-bahdoo is the Tessism for water bottle.  She discerned no reason that each person should have his own assigned bottle.  Clearly the bottles brought were meant to give her a diversity of experiences in water drinking.

Sometimes this game irritated her fellow passengers, but they quickly learned that the greater game of Keeping Tess Happy in the Car was more important than Keeping One’s Own Water Bottle to Oneself. 

She did pretty well napping in the car.  Although Sim did better.  He took more naps – and longer ones! – than she did, but at least she napped.  The only day she skipped was our last leg of driving.  I think she planned it that way so that it would be the last thing we remember, which might mean we’d think twice about another long road trip any time soon.

Hannah, Naomi, and Sim did a bunch of entertaining of Tess, too.  Naomi took the last 45 minutes of the last day and had Tess laughing uncontrollably – MUCH better than crying uncontrollably, which is what it had looked like it would be for a while.   

Tess did her fair share of entertaining, too.  Here she models a beach towel dress that she made herself.  Stunning!  They’ll be all the rage this season.

I have to admit that, even though I did worry about taking Tess on this trip, she handled it well, and so did the rest of us when it got a bit tough with her.  And her cuteness at the other times far outweighed the difficulties in the car.  I mean, when you’ve got someone saying, “Bishon!” in her enthusiastic baby voice, or calling out, “Waterfall!” during Old Faithful’s eruption, it’s pretty darn cute.  Tess is really such a sweetie, and we all love her dearly.

I’m not saying I’ll be scheduling another long road trip soon, though.