With a little bit of summer.

seagulls, summer lake

sunset bone lake

These were taken at the cabin last summer.

I miss summer.

I was reminded of the cabin last night when I read this post on Theta Mom. I wrote a comment that turned into a post. It was way too long for a comment so I scrapped it and wrote something a little shorter.

Theta Mom was talking about a 1000 mile road trip she took with her husband and children.  Most people who have kids, or rented them for a road trip, know exactly where this post is going just by reading the first sentence.

1000 miles in the car + kids = someone is going to puke in the car at some point.

I didn’t have to travel a thousand miles for my kid to puke in my car. I only had to go 35 miles for that to happen. Worse, it was all my fault.

It was a couple of years ago when I was still taking care of my mother. Every 4th of July my family meets at our cabin in western Wisconsin for the holiday weekend. We’ve done this since my parents bought the cabin in 1970.

I packed up the kids (we had an extra rental kid with us), the dog, and my mother into the car for what should have been an hour long trip. My car had a built in DVD player which we had never used before.  All the kids were excited to watch TV in the car and I was sure this would keep the bickering down to a minimum.

Wrong.

Oh, the kids were fine, they sat quietly watching the movie. Mom and I bickered the whole way.

We started to bicker when I gave the kids some cupcakes to eat during the ride. 4th of July cupcakes with red, white and blue frosting on them. My mother was appalled that I would let my kids eat in the car. She obviously hadn’t bothered to ever look at the back seat of my car.

That was just the first thing we argued about. I don’t even remember the rest but it was one of those arguments where you know you can’t make it stop, you really want to make it stop, and you know if it doesn’t stop someone is getting out of the car while it is moving. My mother is the only one who has the ability to make me consider pushing someone out of a moving vehicle.

Luckily the kids all had headphones on.

There could have been a warning but I didn’t hear it.

Just as I was getting ready to kick my disabled mother out of my car, and leave her there until I drove back through after the weekend, I heard the sound that stopped the arguing cold.

Blaaaaahhhh

(I don’t really know how to type that sound)

Red, white and predominantly blue vomit had just been spewed all over the backseat of the car. A good portion of it landing on the rental kid.

At least I had an excuse to pull the car over and get out of the car.

Luckily we were driving through a small town at the time so all I had to do was pull into the parking lot of the bakery. How ironic is that?

My son and I went inside the bakery to try and find something to use to clean the mess.  All this bakery had were those little tissue deals that they use to grab the baked good and shove it in a bag. The kind of tissues that have no absorbency whatsoever.

I didn’t care, I was distracted and my mother was speechless. In actuality she was just thinking about what she was going to say when I got back in the car. Remember, that it was my feeding the kids in the car that started our arguing in the first place.

We got everyone cleaned up as best we could and took off again. I mentioned to my mother that this little incident had just saved her life and I didn’t want to hear anymore about it. We drover the rest of the way in silence.

It was not the food that my daughter ate but the movie she was watching. From that moment on whenever we are in the car she has been instructed to stare out the window at the horizon. As long as she does that she is fine, put in a movie however and she pukes. Simple as that.

I was never able to get the stains nor the smell out of my car, so when my son did this last year I wasn’t too upset.

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