The long drive

The long drive to Ohio and back deserves a blog post. It used to take 10 hours, but with kids it takes 12+. Scott and I take turns driving for about three hours, stopping for gas and potty breaks mostly. We usually make an hour-long stop midway for the kids to roam, usually at a McDonald's PlayPlace but sometimes at a standard sit-down restaurant.

This video is from our trip to Ohio and is pretty typical: Bruce beat-boxing with Scott's iPod in hand (I think he is playing Stickman BMX), Phoebe sleeping like a rag doll, and Scott bored out of his mind in the middle of Pennsylvania. When Phoebe was awake, she was either watching Dora the Explorer and/or eating from a giant bag of M&Ms.

The most interesting part of our roadtrip this time was that Phoebe is in the process of potty-training. She decided to start using the potty a week or two before our trip and has done very well. We put a pull-up on her just in case, but she kept it dry all the way to Ohio (and as soon as I bragged about it in Ohio on Friday night, she pooped her pants - go figure). She stayed dry on the way back too. The trick was that she doesn't give much notice that she needs to go; she would start shrieking and we would pull off at the next exit and get her potty out of the back of the car. We visited a few rest stops and Scott took her into a gas station in Connecticut that he said was the grossest he has been in since coming back from Russia (11 years ago!). Eww. Anyway, we all survived and I'm happy to not buy diapers for a long while!