Road Trip with a preschooler, toddler, and newborn

"Next time we drive seven hours for dinner," I said to Dirk, "we're going to eat someplace more fancy than the Subway in Beaver." However, we probably would have been asked to leave anyplace fancier than the Subway in Beaver. As it was, the employee was very nice about fishing Simon out of the kitchen and bringing him back to us while Ben howled on the floor and Dirk paid for our sandwiches. Alex was very well-behaved, and slept through the entire thing.

Dirk's family gets together in Beaver every Memorial Day for what is the coolest cemetery party ever. Every veteran buried in the Beaver Cemetery gets a full-sized flag by their gravestone on Memorial Day. And about every third person buried in Beaver is a veteran. The men go over about dawn to put the flags up. The rest of the town shows up in the late morning with lawn chairs, water bottles, and all the decorations saved from the funeral, which was probably years earlier. It's a town-sized reunion, as we are not the only family to drive over a hundred miles to get there. The whole day ought to be a front-page story in a magazine called "The Heart of America," if there were such a magazine. Really, it's amazing.

We missed it the year Dirk was deployed, but he's gone every other year. So we packed up our new trailer, our three boys, and headed to Beaver. Baby Alex handled the trip better than either other boy; he zonked out as soon as the truck started moving. Ben and Simon, whose carseats were next to each other, wouldn't leave each other alone long enough to nap. The played more often than they fought, though.

We pulled the trailer in next to Dirk's parents' trailer, where Susan had kindly picked up most of the broken beer bottles. Apparently, we were camping in the Beaver wild spot. Simon found broken glass anyway. He and Ben headed out the trailer door at the same time. Ben won the contest for the stairs, and Simon went headfirst into the dirt and glass. He's got a scab under his nose, and a couple scratches at his hairline. But after being wiped off, he recommenced running back and forth.

We tried; we really did. But Ben's bladder ended up with the veto vote. He won't potty anywhere besides our house. After a few hours of dancing trauma, he piddled on the bathroom floor in Shawn's hotel room (sorry, Shawn and Kris! we cleaned it up!), and we decided not to put all of us through that again the next morning. We hooked up the trailer and headed home. The boys finally fell asleep about 10:30. We got home about 12:30. And Ben happily pottied in his very own potty the next morning. A happy bladder makes a happy boy.

We got to introduce Makae, Dirk's niece, to Baby Alex. It was great to see her, and she thinks the baby is cute. Woo!

We were sad to miss the traditional party. We were also sad to miss the opportunity to listen to Simon excitedly mangle the pronunciation of "flag" in ways that cannot be transcribed on a family-friendly blog. So we took him to the local cemetery, where he got to run around and name all the "flags" he could see.