We spent a big chunk of the day on the front porch since we're painting the basement and the fumes are outrageous. The pool and the play equipment is out back, so that's our default hang-out. But today we wandered out front and rocked and yammered on about a whole lot of nothing. Boy, does Ellery love a good rocking chair.
We headed out for dinner (see note about fumes). On the way there Neko drank an entire can of sparkling water, which we didn't think much of until on the way home she suddenly really had to go to the bathroom. We offered to stop by Grandma Barb's house, but she declined. And then we pulled into the parking lot of a coffee shop, and she declined. Finally we figured out she was holding out for a gas station bathroom.
This probably sounds like a weird, and somewhat troubling, preference. But I think it stems from one of the gas station bathrooms between here and Chicago which had a power dryer similar to the Dyson Airblade, which is about as much fun as hand drying can be.
Anyway, we declined to cater to the bathroom preference, so we had a really wiggly five-year-old in the back seat the whole ride home. She was doing okay until we turned onto our road, which has up and down hills that often give you that roller coaster feeling. As we progressed down the road, all of a sudden a she gave us a look of horror and wailed, "Oh, no, not the hills!"
And Tom and I laughed until we cried. Probably mostly because we are so tired, but also because we've all been in that desperate situation where the littlest thing could tip you over into the realm of not quite making it.
And, yeah, she was super-mad about us laughing so hard, so we spent the rest of the evening telling her tales of times when we had to go to the bathroom so badly we thought we would die. Like that one time the navigation took us to the wrong hotel in Boston, and just as Anne and Tom thought they might have a chance of not exploding, we ran headlong into a Mexican Pride parade? (They made it…but just barely.)