Our Journey Back Home

After a fun and exciting week with family and friends, it was time for our family to head back home yesterday. We loaded up the trunk to nearly beyond its capacity, strapped up our Christmas presents to the back of our car, and enclosed Sophie in the back seat with even more of our junk.


We double checked and triple checked our straps and knots, and then got on the road. About half way home, we ran into some rain. It made for a slightly slower drive, but was overall enjoyable to see (that's the Arizonan in me).

As a favor to one of Jake's co-workers, we were transporting some late Christmas gifts with us. The plan was to meet said co-worker's dad at the Target by our house to give him the gifts. Sophie was at her wits end with the car seat and lack of dinner, and I knew we were barely going to make it to Target and then to our house before she went all-out hysterical. (She was figuring out that the pacifier I kept offering her did not provide milk).

Well, as we pulled into Target, we encountered an unusually large bump, followed by an unusually large crashing noise, and shortly thereafter, an unusually worried "Oh, crap" from Jake. Since Sophie was crying, I assumed that something from our overloaded back seat had somehow landed in Sophie's lap, so I quickly turned around, only to look out the back window and NOT see our bikes. The large bump had snapped one of our bike rack straps (which sailed across the car and landed on the windshield) and the entire bike rack fell off the car. No, the hook did not break. The strap actually frayed and split apart. It must have been fraying the entire trip home. I felt very fortunate that this did not happen on the freeway, or else we would be bikeless at this very moment.

Back to the story.

I hit the hazard lights and Jake jumped out of the car to pull the bikes and the rack all the way off the car and out of the street. I moved the car to a nearby parking spot, but then decided to drive over to Target to see if I could drop off the presents. I couldn't find the person we were supposed to meet, but during my drive through the lot, Sophie (as predicted) became hysterical. I go back to my original parking spot, park the car, and lean over the back seat to unstrap her. (the car was too full to reach in from the side to get her). I pull her up to the driver's seat, and begin nursing her.

Sophie, in the past week, due to vacation stress, illness, or just because she's getting older, decided to have a bowel movement only once every 24 to 36 hours. It had been a long time since we had seen a soiled diaper, and the poor child finally figured out how to let it all go. I had never heard her "go" for so long. As she was nursing, I kept checking the back of her onesie to see if she had exploded (she did something similar, but not as extreme earlier in the week, so I knew what to expect). After a minute or two, it started seeping through. I grabbed the blanket sitting on the car seat next to me and placed it under her for the duration of the feeding. When she was done (well, probably not quite done, but we weren't in an ideal location for a proper feeding.) I took off her sweater and pants to assess the damage. Here's what I saw:

So I took everything off, and here's what was left:

Reminders: I am in the driver's seat of our car. We are in a shopping complex parking lot. Jake is outside trying to figure out how to reattach the bikes to get them home. It's raining.

I take out my travel wipes, which luckily are plentiful and still moist, and proceed to wipe Sophie down from neck to toes. She does not enjoy a cold sponge bath, but is pretty cooperative. I decide not to deal with the diaper at the moment, due to the lack of changing-diaper space, so I take a new diaper, lay it flat in her car seat, and place my poor nearly-naked baby back in (over the front seat again) and buckle her up. The hysterics start again, but I decide that it's better to let her cry for the few minutes it takes to get home, because there wasn't much I could do where we were.

Jake got the bikes back on, using special knots learned in Boy Scouts or something, we got the presents to the rightful owners, and we got back on the road. It's about a 2 1/2 mile straight shot to our house and luckily, we didn't have any more problems.

We pulled up to the house and I got Sophie out of her car seat once again and we headed straight to the bath. The onesie and the blanket were immediately sprayed with Dreft baby poo spray and sent straight into the washer, but sadly did not survive.