Travel woes

Man I hate travelling. I used to absolutely love it. 18 hour drive? I'm in. No problem. It's so much more complicated travelling with 3 or 4 kids and at least one dog.

I have to start getting ready to get ready to travel like a couple of weeks ahead of time. No more spontaneous travel... have to call the dog kennel to board the spastic black lab (actually, they love her there - says she is very well behaved and a pleasure - are they really talking about my dog?) ...arrange for someone to come over and feed the crazy outside dog (he's actually the best dog we have - but way too big and clumsy and happy to be an inside dog) ... and make sure that wherever we're going will allow us to bring our loudmouth stinky weiner dog.

Then it's getting tons of laundry done. Making sure I have enough clean bottles to bring. Get most of the dishes done so they don't stink up the house while we're gone. Call the post office to hold the mail. Call the bus garage and let them know our older daughter won't be going to school, call the school and tell them the same thing. Make sure most of the bills are paid and go to the bank to get cash to travel with as we have no atm card or check cashing card (which I actually prefer - so much easier to keep track of when it's just a checkbook). Make sure the car is mostly clean. The actual getting the dog to the kennel...

Then comes the packing. Must make sure older daughter packs appropriate clothes (for some reason she thinks traveling means showcasing her worst clothes), making sure I have enough diapers and wipes for the babies, bottles, onsies, sleepers, 2 outfits for each day....spares in the diaper bag for when we're on the road. Then throwing my stuff and my husband's stuff together an hour or so before we leave and hope I don't forget underwear or my toothbrush...

Then it's making sure we hit the road by 9am so we can make McDonald's breakfast on the way!

The traveling part is OK sometimes. As long as the kids are happy. How it usually works is that they are great for the first half of the trip, and just when you think everything is going great is when the meltdowns start... then it's stopping to change diapers, stopping to feed the baby, changing more diapers... and when you need a diaper change the gas station you stop at doesn't have a changing station... Most of the time it's the very last half hour of a trip that gets crazy. But the last road trip it was the *entire* trip home. At least it was a relatively short trip (half the distance we usually go)...
Anyway. It's going to be lots of fun.