Thanksgiving - A Mixed Bag

Well, we went out of town for Thanksgiving, to my oldest friend's house in the town I grew up in, located in deepest, flattest, sandiest south Georgia. I'll write more about that later (last year at Thanksgiving was the first time I had been back to that town in right about 10 years, and it raises a welter of thoughts and emotions for me to go back there. My relationship with that town is a strange and troubled one). But I wanted to observe first that traveling around the Thanksgiving holiday sucks the big one. Always. It's impossible to have a smooth travel experience at Thanksgiving, at least for my family.


We left early on Thursday morning. I had to work all day Wednesday, and we have long learned that Wednesday traffic is rarely, if ever, worth the extra time at one's destination, so we decided to go on Thursday. We thought we would leave super early on Thursday, hoping that spending time on the road while it was still dark would allow Caetlin to go back to sleep in the car- she hasn't slept in the car in many months. We didn't get up early enough, so the sun was just starting to come up as we got on the road. Caetlin stayed pretty mellow, though not asleep, through the first few hours of the trip, including when we stopped for breakfast.


It was the last hour that really tried my- our- patience. She was bored, tired of riding in the car, ready to be moving around. We didn't want to stop, as we were so close to being there and on a deadline, since dinner was scheduled for 1. She started throwing things around the car and asking for them, and as I am always the passenger, it's my job to fetch the things she throws and otherwise keep her happy. I hate this job. It's frustrating, and uncomfortable, as often the seat belt cuts into my neck, and sometimes I get car sick from having to turn around and find things, and she cries when I can't find the exact thing she wants. Unfortunately, about 25 minutes away (yes, seriously, only 25 minutes), she lost it, and I lost it with her. She started crying, tears rolling down her face, and throwing some of the what seemed like dozens of toys that she had in her car seat. I was so frustrated, with my inability to make her happy, with her inability to just relax for another 25 minutes, with her inability to allow me to just sit and face forward for a few ever-loving minutes, that I started throwing toys too. (Not at her, of course.) Yes, it was tough to distinguish the adult from the two-year-old at that point. No, it was not my finest parenting moment.

Anyway, things did get better. We all managed to pull ourselves together and pulled up to our friends' house and had some Thanksgiving. We had a lovely time at Thanksgiving dinner and though Caetlin didn't nap, she still had a good time. The next day we were kind of on our own, so Caetlin spent a good amount of time at the playground. I had to leave her and Bruce there and work back at the hotel. She cried when I drove away. Yeah, THAT sucked.

I picked them back up after a couple of hours of work and we went to one of the two casual dining chains in town for lunch. Waiting for our drinks, Caetlin started crying and screaming to change her diaper, which is not like her at all, and before we could do anything like get her out of the highchair and out to the car to change her diaper, all of her breakfast started pouring out of her. She vomited, four huge spews all over the table, the highchair, herself, the floor.


Apparently, it's not Thanksgiving unless Caetlin is sick.

The wonderful waitstaff (minus our pansy waiter, who told us he has a weak stomach and had to hand us off to someone else) cleaned up the mess, while Bruce cleaned up Caetlin. Caetlin managed rally enough to have a couple of crackers and then we took her back to the hotel for a nap. She was off her feed and running a slight temperature the whole rest of the weekend, and still appears to be fighting off the bug, whatever it is. It didn't help that we'd jacked with her schedule so badly, though she's coming out of it by now.


We whiled away another day (we went over to the beach, and a couple pics from that day will be posted shortly), and decided to leave Saturday night to miss the Sunday traffic and hopefully have Caetlin sleep in the car most of the way home. A long, late nap and heavy rain foiled our plans; she stayed awake and cranky for the first two hours or so of the 4 hour trip. My heartburn started up about the time she fell asleep, cutting off any possibility of pulling over to find my antacids. The rain continued unabated, heavy, scary, big trucks roaring by splashing big sheets of water onto the windshield. Every so often I could feel the car shimmy over deep standing water in the road. I tried to sleep and couldn't really, because I was cold and because of my stomach. But I couldn't really stay awake either.

We pulled into home at about 1:30 a.m., and Caetlin went back down without too much fuss. I climbed into bed, exhausted, but had a hard time falling asleep. Thinking about how tired I was, and how I had to work Sunday and how I'm tired of working (I logged in all 4 days this holiday weekend, even though it hasn't been for very long each time).

In short, the time with our friends was wonderful, but the travel and the barfing and the working- not so much. It wasn't as restful a trip as I hoped it would be. It's funny- it's like the more I need a particular time to be restful, the more guaranteed it is that I won't be allowed to relax.

Anyway, home again, home again, as the old nursery rhyme goes. On the downhill slope to Christmas.