Road Trips with Little Girls are quite the trip

I took the girls up to Dallas this weekend to meet Grandma Jane and go see the live production of The Wizard of Oz. I get home from work, pack and load everything, and tell the girls repeatedly to go potty. Dowlan runs around making sure they're fed and dressed, then shoos them towards the potty as well.

Less than one mile from the road, not even on the highway yet, Dixie announces the inevitable: I have to go potty.

Normally I'm a firm believer in Annie's Treatise on Scatological Urgency (when you gotta go, you gotta go) but I was not pulling over for this pee-pee until we were at least an hour in the trip. At that point, I also needed gas, so I find a convenience store and Dixie has conveniently forgotten that she needed so urgently to go.

We keep heading on and Melody announces: I'm Hungary.

Assuming she's wanting food and not declaring herself a sovereign European nation, I find another convenience store. She decides she only wants to eat Healthy Foods. In a convenience store? You gotta be kidding me.

I point her to popcorn and the "fresh" fruit. (Yes. I just used air quotes.) She decides on a bag of popcorn, a banana, and (for good measure) a bag of cotton candy. Purple cotton candy. Dixie also needs popcorn. Back in PennyVann, Dixie announces: You know what this van needs? A refrigerator and a television. If we had a refrigerator and a television, we'd be able to go forever.

We're on our way, once again. I take the wrong exit and end up moving over to the other road about twenty miles too early, so I'm averaging 50 miles an hour instead of "70" miles an hour. (Again with the air quotes? Sheesh.)

The two-hour trip is made in just under three hours, which I am declaring to be darn good time, given my chosen companions. We swim in the hotel and each girl bravely demonstrates how she can swim with no floaties for several feet. Dixie can go about twice as far as Melody, has better form and can also do a somersault underwater if you hold her hands as she does it. She doesn't even kick you every single time.

Grandma's white hair turns green from the chlorine, but we promise her that no one will notice and we head to eat dinner at Chili's. Dixie announces to the hostess: my Gramma's hair is green! Melody eats more in one sitting than in the last five years and we head back to fall asleep while watching High School Musical II on the Disney channel on a tv with colors so imbalanced that Zac Effron looks like he's an over-wholesome alien being.

Grandma has offered to take the girls home with her the next day, so we wake up in the morning, eat breakfast and go to Target since I'd packed light for the weekend. A couple sets of clothes and a still-in-the-back-of-the-van Father's Day gift later, we head to eat, then change clothes, grab the ten-year-old girl we were borrowing and go to see the show.

The show was amazing. The tornado scared me to death and the singing and dancing were wonderful. The Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man were cast so absolutely perfectly. And it was neat to see the parts left out of the movie. They even costumed it so that the black and white portions of the film were done in sepia tones.

The girls did extremely well through the show and were so excited. We ate at the McDonald's across the street before parting ways. I returned the spare ten-year-old girl and began the extremely quiet and quick drive home with no one to demand a potty or healthy snack.

***

Thanks for all the supportive words about Charlie. He has another evaluation Wednesday morning at 9. After that, we should know if his delays are something on the autism spectrum or if they are more in line with a sensory processing or integration disorder. Once we have some answers, I will let everyone know more about what is going on.

As still and odd as the house seems without the two little girls, I know it will be so much easier to both be able to go to the appointment without their "help".