"The wheels on the bus go... BLEECCCCHHH!!!"

Our trip down South in July pretty much obliterated any talk of further vacations this summer. Not that it wasn't fun (it was!), but it was just, um... exhausting.

One would think that a jaunt out to Long Island to see the folks would be peanuts compared to our Memphis trip, right? Hardly a "vacation" and barely even a "trip."

Let's analyze this one the way they do with other disasters, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl:

1) I didn't pack flip-flops or sunscreen. In fact, I didn't even pack socks or an extra t-shirt. You could say that I didn't bother to pack at all.
2) I forgot it was Wednesday, which means there are no alternate side parking restrictions on our block. This is bad, because I timed the trip to take advantage of late morning spots right before street cleaning.
3) The Mz. took the boy up to Starbucks right before we left, causing him to become sweaty and irritable, or "hot and bothered."

4) The ZipCar we rented was littered with old snacks.
5) Totally unconfirmed, but it's possible that I fed Jr. expired yogurt that morning. I don't think so, but it's possible.
6) Since I was double parked, the Mz. & boy had to watch the car (they really fucking ticket on our block) while I sherpa'ed our gear out.
7) I hadn't even touched the new car seat since Memphis, so it still fit the boy as poorly as it did then; probably worse.
8) It was about 145 degrees outside.
9) I put the seat in behind the passenger side, instead of the driver side. This meant that Jr. caught the sun right in the face the entire trip.

OK, not exactly a perfect storm, but I'm just trying to understand what exactly happened here. Nothing out of the ordinary to start with... we wrestled and stuffed Jr. into the car seat and drove away. He didn't seem real happy, but who could blame the kid? He basically bitched and moaned from Harlem to the Northern State.

Musta been around exit 38 when Jr. started puking his fucking guts out. This kid hasn't really puked since his onesie days, so it was a bit startling. As we all know, babies "spit up," which is absolutely no big deal at all and not much different than dabbing up spilled salad dressing at the steak house. I am in no way averse to cleaning up my son's spit-up.

This was a completely different thing-- "big boy throw-up" you might call it. I call it "your asshole friend from college blew chunks all over my fucking back seat." I almost thought I could smell buffalo wings and Bacardi, but that's obviously impossible. The shit was everywhere, and it smelled like death itself.

Of course the kid's bawling his eyes out, and Mz. is scrambling for anything absorbent. I was busy making mistake #10:
10) I got off the Parkway and made a beeline for a stretch of road with unspeakable traffic and nowhere to turn off whatsoever (Jericho Tpk next to the Oyster Bay Golf Course).

After sitting in dead-stop traffic for the temporal equivalent of seventeen panic attacks, we balied out and turned off into a very rich and very private little cul-de-sac. We set up a mini-camp on somebody's exquisite side-lawn and stripped the boy down. I was on "brain detail," sopping up puke particles off the car seat and elsewhere. When the dust settled we had a reasonably clean kid, a backseat that stunk to Gehenna itself, and a huge pile of baby wipes on somebody's perfect lawn. I snuck around the side and dumped it in what was seriously the cleanest, nicest garbage can I've ever seen.

The car seat was unusable at this point, so Mz. held the kid in her lap as I slalomed down Jericho and tried to remember all (or any) of the good shortcuts we used to take when we drove drunk in high school. I stuck with the one easy one and got us home in reasonable time. We pulled in to my folks' place late for lunch and smelling like puke (also like high school). Our Pulp Fiction tribute continued as we hosed off and made wisecracks for a while.

The rest of our visit (which was really the visit, since all the sicko shit happened before we even got there) was pretty uneventful, highlighted by tasty porkchops and a late-night snoozer of a Yankee game. The boy walked right into the side of our car door (perpendicularly), putting a dent right down the middle of his face. He also pitched a fairly violent fit when we tried to drive him over to Sunken Meadow park this morning, which I completely understood. Continuing with the "drunk college friend" analogy, putting that kid back in his pukey car seat would be like making the fictional puker a Tabasco & 151 omelet for breakfast the next morning. We were lucky to get him home at all today, especially when you throw in a mandatory Ikea stop mid-voyage.

I'm supposed to take Jr. to next weekend's game for Calculator Day, although I'm having second thoughts. Maybe September's Soup Bowl Night will be a better fit.