Cheap Red Wine from a Hotel Bar

So the rest of our first night on our jaunt to Connecticut to see A.J.’s grandmother was fairly uneventful.  Really, after someone gets busted with a hooker on your floor, everything else is tame.  We get up early to continue on our way.  Seeing that apparently Hooters does not serve breakfast, A.J. drove through a Dunkin Donuts.  Being in the driver’s seat going through any drive thru with four loud children is enough to put anyone over the edge.  Add to that -one very picky, yet indecisive woman(my mother-in-law) who is pissed that we aren’t at Starbucks, and one wife(me) who is not allowed to have any dairy products right now due to the baby possibly having an allergy to milk, and it makes for one very tense situation.  I think I actually saw sweat dripping down A.J.’s brow, his hands clenched around the steering wheel as he tried to place our order with more and more cars pulling up behind us in line,  and five people barking orders at him from the back.  This brings me to a flashback of one particular road trip in my youth when my father had a similar tense situation at a drive thru.  We had been on one of our trips to Connecticut to see his side of the family.  He got mad at my sister Nikki, beamed a half full coke can to the back of the car which missed her and hit me in the head, spilling everywhere. I’m sure by that point we were all heckling my father so it was most definitely provoked. But the main point of all this rambling is that road trips bring out the best in everyone. 

Later in the day on Friday, after we had been to see A.J.’s grandma, we checked into that night’s hotel(much to A.J.’s dismay there was no Hooters attached to it).  My mother-in-law and I stayed in the hotel room with all four of the children while A.J. went back to the nursing home to spend some one on one time with his grandmother.  By this point the children have been pretty much confined to very small spaces(the Gray Goose and Grandma’s shared room at the nursing home) for the past eight to ten hours, so a hotel room is like a palace to them.  Jimmy strips down to his underwear and starts leaping from one bed across to the other.  Sawyer decides to join in, only being that he is still in that chubby toddler stage, he misses the landing several times.  I’m attempting to breastfeed Bart on one of the beds, praying that the boys stay clear of the baby’s head as they hurl their bodies across the room.  Josie who has now lost interest in her iPod joins in the raucous and now they decide it’d be fun to run back and forth across the room and into the bathroom which has some nice slippery tile floors and leap back across the beds, much in the fashion of an obstacle course.  Bear Grylls should try spending one day with my children…Yelling at each of them to stop has not deterred their very clear efforts to inflict injury upon themselves.  Frustrated and done with them all, I yell “Stop jumping off the beds!  If you get hurt I don’t have a car here and you know what that means, it means we’d have to call an ambulance!”  They stop, it is silent for a fleeting moment before those evil grins spread across their impish faces and they laugh and fling themselves from bed to bed…THREE, yes THREE hours later, A.J. arrives with dinner.  It’s 9PM and cheap red wine from a hotel bar has never tasted so good.