grand adventure, day 2.

it seems life got in the way again and interrupted my plan of "catching up" on blog posts.  pricing items for a garage sale we are holding this weekend took over my "spare" time.  i'm not a big fan of preparing for a garage sale.  it was an emotional thing to do this time (getting rid of all that little baby stuff, sniff sniff) but i *know* it is just stuff.  sentimental stuff.  but still just stuff.  i pray that someone else can enjoy a new little babe, fresh from God in those precious clothes and make use of it.  (in other words, i hope i sell it all and all this stress and time spent pricing it will be worth it!)

ANYHOO... on to day 2. 

it started with a bang at 1:30am.... but first i need to back up a little. 

when we finally got into our hotel room that first night, our eldest DD was complaining of a stiff neck and was not herself at all.  she even opted not to go swimming at the pool.  i gave her some ibuprofen and we all just went to bed.  allll in the same little room.  our original reservation, at our original hotel was for a two room suite.  well, the hotel that we were moved to had no such thing.  so a "two queen" room it would be.  and as i said in my last post, it turned out to be quite providential that the change was made. 

back to 1:30am.  i woke up.  bright light shining into the room.  dd#2 must have gone to the bathroom and not turned off the light.  i went to turn it off and when i came back to the main room i smelled a not-so-nice smell.  (cause ya know, 6 people sleeping in one room should smell like roses, right?)  it smelled like puke. i whisper to chad.... "honey, are you awake? it smells like puke in here"  he has superior night vision and got up to check each of our sleeping babes.  he signaled it was the oldest.  i went to investigate.  GROSS.  everywhere.  in her hair, down the side of the bed, on the side of the pack-n-play miss baby was sleeping in, like projectile, everywhere. GAG, GAG, GROSS.  (i don't deal well with puke) and our oldest was sleeping through it all.  so chad got her up and had the super fun job of trying to wash it out of her hair.  meanwhile i had the super fun job of trying to clean up the bed and floor without waking the rest of the family. we put everything out in the hall and called down to the front desk to notify them there was a large mass of stinky towels and bed linens in the hallway and that we could use a few more fresh towels. we all went back to sleep eventually and decided we would not try to make it on the road by a certain time that day.  i never would have smelled that she puked if we were not all put in the same room.  kudos to the hotel staff not only for having to clean up that nasty pile of smelly stuff but for making sure we woke up to a huge pile of fresh clean towels outside our door. :)

fast forward a few hours.  our oldest does not want to get back in the car. her only driving force is that we will see grandma d soon.  we make a stop at the local wally world to pick up motion sickness medicine and more ibuprofen.  we hit the road again (about 2 hours later than we would have liked) pretty much figuring that we would be finding a hotel in Spokane but we would see how the day went.  

aside from the rough start, day 2 turned out to be pretty stress free. we had one "bathroom issue" which required a change of clothes, but our stops seemed to be more effective and traveling went really smoothly and by lunch our oldest was a bit more perky. 

above pictures from our lunch stop, gorgeous, hot sunny day!

at our "snack time" stop at the last rest area in Montana we met some extremely tame rodents of some kind (i heard someone call them lemmings, but i'm pretty sure they were some type of chipmunk or squirrel).  the oldest was freaked out by them (in her defense, one of them did come up behind her and smacked her on her back) but we had fun feeding them crackers and cheese.  even miss baby thought they were pretty interesting. (see below)

we got to spokane around dinner time and we let the kids vote on if they wanted to keep going.  the thought that they could see grandma d that very night swayed them to continue on.  once we got to ellensburg we changed them into their pj's and put in the movie Wall-E and they promptly fell asleep.  now listening to this movie from the front seat and not seeing the picture is insanely boring.  there are no words for like the first hour.  just little robot noises.  snnoooooze.  which is exactly what chad and i both wanted to do.  but we couldn't.  must. keep. driving.  we didn't want to stop to switch drivers and risk waking the sleeping beasts angels, so we had to literally rub our faces to keep awake. chad and i love road trips partly because of the opportunity to talk about whatever comes to mind.  nothing was coming to mind. empty, tired, minds.

we made it of course, cause my hubby is superman.  12:30am we rolled in to Lynden in our super cool cargo-topped van. ;)  woot woot!  ahhh, home sweet home. (away from home anyway)