It's Not a Road Trip Until Someone Pees by the Highway

We decided to escape the madness and the boxes and the elevated stress levels at home, so I loaded up the girls and we drove down to my parents yesterday. Possibly this had something to do with the fact that I nearly started crying because all of the wine glasses were packed. (Items I use on a daily basis: wine glasses and fuzzy blankets.)

The girls are really pretty good travelers--I didn't even bring the ipad and they just paged through books and napped a little bit. At one point they were making up and singing songs together, which was the cutest thing ever. I listened to a couple of podcasts but realized that most of the podcasts I like are not appropriate for kids (too much cursing!) and then my phone lost internet connection out in the boonies, so we listened to really random CDs that were in my car--Leonard Cohen and Peter, Paul, and Mary.

There were a few frustrating moments--we were about two hours into the four hour trip when Zuzu started getting very curious about whether we were there yet: "Is this Grammy's city?" she asked at every little farm town we drove through. Coco will do this thing where she whines, "mooooooommmmmy" and then when I say, "What, honey?" she mumbles softly in the backseat, which is infuriating because she can be as LOUD as she wants to be, but she decides to operate on this level of a just-barely-audible whine, apparently just to make me crazy. We were five miles outside my hometown when she started making that noise and I had to say, "What? What? WHAT?" and then, in a fake cheerful tone, "Okay, when you're ready to talk so that I can hear you, I will be listening."

And then finally she yelled that she had to go potty "SO BAD."

I asked her if she could wait a few more minutes and she repeated that she had to go SO BAD and sounded kind of panicky, so I asked if she needed to go in the grass and she said yes. And so I pulled over and put my flashers on and she peed on the side of the highway.

Then we loaded back up and got to my parents' house ten minutes later.

The plan is to chillax here for a few days, then head back to St. Louis for a birthday party, a hair appointment, a visit to the primary classroom at Coco's school, and all the rest of the packing and organizing. There are some details about our closing/moving that are making me really nervous--mostly that our buyers want to close as early as possible so they can move in, but our sellers aren't going to be out until 3. I think this means that our buyers need to understand that we won't be out until 3, but I'm not sure that has been clearly communicated, because our realtor said something about us being out by 1:30. (Um... then what do we do?). Also our realtor seems to think that the sellers will be out earlier than 3, which I think is absolutely crazy (if they have until 3, they are going to take until 3, is what I think). So that is stressing me out. Surely this will work out, right? I don't know how people do this. Move houses, I mean, and close on the same day. Ugh. 

Meanwhile, I'm spending a lot of time on Pinterest daydreaming about furniture and paint colors and I keep realizing I can't remember what the house really looks like. Weird!