WAKE UP!

It's 5:40 a.m. and this is what I feel like saying to my husband and son. I'm like a kid on Christmas - in a few hours, we'll be headed over to the island for vacation, and I can't sleep! I've been up for an hour already. Since the three of us are sharing a hotel room in lovely Grand Blanc, MI, it's not like we could stay up late; I think I was asleep by 10. But I should be able to sleep now. It's SO dark in this room (well, except for the bluish glow of my computer now) and the boys are both heavy breathing, which is a really nice sound to fall asleep to. Alas, I'm blogging instead.
We had a really good day yesterday, considering we were in the car from 8:20 a.m. to 7:20 p.m., other than the first hour of the trip when we were sitting in traffic and I was saying "I told you we should have gone the other way!" Got to work on that - nobody likes the "I told you so" girl! Charlie was an excellent traveller. I was amazed - he didn't start to get fussy until the last hour of the trip! We stopped mid-morning and bought him a little Crayola dry-erase crayon kit, which kept him entertained for a while. Luckily they're washable crayons, because they're also incredibly liquid for crayons and his white t-shirt and car seat are now sporting beautiful primary color squiggles all over! Then we stopped for lunch at my all-time favorite fast food, Chick-fil-a! I didn't know Chick-fil-a had made it's way as far north as Pittsburgh, so we had quite a celebration when we saw the sign. After we filled ourselves and gassed up the car, were on our way again. At this point, George had done all the driving, so we stopped again around 4 to stretch our legs, let Charlie run around a bit, and switch so I could drive. (Here's where I mention how much I love diapers. I'm quite sure that we wouldn't have made it to 4 p.m. if we'd had a potty-training kid in the car. Mental note - do not potty train in summer.) The running around part was great until he dropped my un-opened water bottle and it broke and about flooded some lady's shoes. Luckily she was very understanding. I got into the driver's seat for the last few hours of our trip and drove right into a ginormous rain storm. What a great time to offer to drive! It was crazy - right before Detroit the skies opened and the road got very trecherous. We were forced to slow WAY down b/c visibility was nonexistent. We made it through and didn't start hearing the radio reports of tornado watches until we were on the other side, which was good since I might of panicked considering I have NO idea what you're supposed to do if you're in a car during a tornado. That whole "stay away from windows" thing would be pretty difficult...
At that point we'd been mostly in the car, other than our short breaks, for pretty much the entire day, and our little guy was still just looking out the window. Granted we listened to a LOT of his music (of which we unfortunately only have 2 CDs, so we listened to the same songs a LOT of times) and for a while, I sat in the back seat and handed him toys he could play with, but we didn't even pull out the computer-as-DVD-player like we thought we might need to. He ate a LOT and listened to his music and played with a couple of toys and generally was the happy little guy we love! Considering he only slept about an hour of the drive, instead of taking his normal 3 hour nap, we were grateful for his demeanor.
And today we only have 4 hours to go! And then we'll be on the ferry headed over to the island paradise we love to spend time with family and friends. Yippee!