I Can't Believe I Said I Do This

I did it. I told my sister that I'd bring all five of the kids to her house tomorrow and spend the
day. Why is that so horrible? It really isn't. I am actually looking forward to spending the time
with her and her kids. What I'm dreading is the drive all the way to Fort Worth...with all five
of my kids stuffed into a Buick.

No, we don't have a mini-van. No cool SUV for us. We have a Buick. It seats six, comfortably
GM alleges. But I don't know how much comfort we'll be seeing when the "he hit me," "she
breathed on me," olympiad begins in the back seat. Since I got this vehicle for free from my dad,
I'm not complaining about it. My complaints are confined to the behavior of children ranging in
age from nine to fourteen seatbelted in the same space for an hour or more each way.

I miss the days of each child having his own sippy cup of juice and little bag of dry cereal they
could munch on while listening to audio cassettes of various sing-along nursery rhymes that would
inevitably get stuck in my head and embarrass me when I found myself singing aloud while typing
on my computer at work. (Man, I think I miss work, too.) Now that we've got three tweens and
a two teens, I don't have a lot of ideas as to how to entertain them without someone ending up
with bruised shoulders from playing punch buggy. I'm wondering if they'll be up for the old alphabet
games where you find words on billboards and license tags that begin with each letter of the alphabet.

I'm hoping my sister has something amazing lined up at her house to exhaust them all that they'll
sleep all the way back home in the afternoon. But with my luck, I'm probably going to end up
raiding her pantry for oat cereal and plastic sandwich bags.