Virginia: Day 1

Thursday November 7, 2013

On Thursday we headed one state away to Virginia! We were invited to a wedding and, in fact, I was asked to be the matron of honor. An honor, indeed!

I planned a two-day school week, then Wednesday was set aside to pack up every body. This always takes great coordination, lists, check marks, and calculations about what exact outfits are needed for what outings and on what order they need to be worn and which night I'll do the laundry in the hotel.

We departed bright and early on Thursday, grabbing breakfast at a drive-through on the road. The car time should have been four and a half hours plus stops. This trip turned out to be possibly our best ever!

We stopped once for lunch at a pizza buffet, plus made two pit stops: that was it! Nobody threw up. Right there, we're already doing great. Meanwhile, the four- and six-year-olds got along beautifully in the third row. They called each other names only one time! And they even made up some fun car games between themselves. In the second row, the two-year-old drew pictures in her little notebook and spent most of the time caring for her baby doll Sally: cradling it, "nursing" it, telling me that I had to be quiet because Sally was napping, and so forth. The baby had one crying jag, but it ended when he fell asleep.

Chris and I actually got to talk for nearly four hours! If you have a bunch of small kids, you know this is a rarity.

We got settled into the hotel, went out for dinner at a restaurant, and dealt with only one major tantrum of the day. The bedtime change-of-routine was a comedy of errors: trying to get three kids to fall asleep in one room while letting the sleeping baby remain sleeping was an effort that lasted more than an hour and was not exactly fun. But they finally fell asleep and Chris and I were able to rent a still-in-theatre movie (about JFK--very interesting) on the hotel TV, which is as close as he and I ever get to watching theatre movies!