The Road Trip that Wasn't

Every summer, we find a day to skip town and head up to my brother's house in Pennsylvania so we can swim in their pool...and so we can visit with them, of course.  ;-)  It is a JOYFUL day that we look forward to with much anticipation!

This year, we had originally planned on a day in July, but plans changed, and we switched to a Sunday in August.  That just happened to be yesterday.

Saturday we made our preparations and were eager to get an early start on Sunday morning.  I didn't plan on such an early start however: Moriah woke up and vomited around 4:00 a.m.  But it wasn't much vomit, and she didn't do it again, and no one else was sick, and maybe it was just something she ate...so we continued with our plan and left home and picked up my mother at the nursing home and hit the freeway and drove north.

Until Moriah threw up again.  :(

And then a flurry of text messages back and forth to my sister-in-law, and a phone call from my brother, and the sad decision that, even though they said we could still come, we'd better not because we would hate to pass any germs along to them and their kids.

We turned around and headed south again.

It was disappointing, of course, but both Jeff and I had a strong sense of "maybe God is protecting us this way."  There's no way to know, but maybe we would have been in a traffic accident, or maybe one of the kids would have gotten hurt in the pool, or maybe...well, who knows?  But my heart was comforted by the realization that God is in control, and there was a reason Moriah threw up when she did!

I was kicking myself a little, however, for not having taken Moriah's sickness seriously and not having cancelled the trip before we even started, but then I realized that the hour or so we spent driving up the road and the hour or so we spent driving down the road were not wasted time.  If we had not done that, I would have missed...

...watching my mom and Benjamin make eye contact with each other and smile and smile and smile.

...time to read stories aloud to my family, including the excellent and sobering book The Tsunami Quilt by Anthony Fredericks.  Reading about that real-life tragedy went a long way towards putting our minor disappointment into proper perspective!

...hearing my mom express her joy that we got to go for a drive on a beautiful day!  Since her memory is gone, she lives almost entirely in the moment; and the moments we spent with her yesterday were beautiful for her with no thought of "things went wrong and I wish we could have gone to Pennsylvania."  She loved getting out and seeing the gorgeous landscape, and I loved seeing her have that pleasure.

...capturing these precious faces.  I thought we would have a lot more pictures to share by the end of yesterday, but I only took a few...just to remember who was with us and how we looked on a day in August that didn't go the way we thought it would.

This was David's bright, shiny, expectant face, long before we knew we wouldn't make it to PA.

He is such a great help with Benjamin that he often gets the honor of sitting beside his baby brother.  :)

Jeff always gets stuck in the driver's seat.  :)

Whenever we go on a trip like this...

...I am conscious of the enormous blessing that it is to have both of my parents with us.

I had a little trouble taking a good picture of the Back Seat Boys.  ;-)

And that leaves Moriah and I in the middle seat.

As we traveled towards home again--MUCH earlier in the day than we had originally planned--Jeff and I were busy thinking of what we could do as a consolation prize of sorts for the four oldest boys.  Thanks to Jeff's creativity and the generosity of a kind friend, we were able to get four passes to one of our all-time favorite places around here, Massanutten Waterpark, and Jeff took the boys and they had a fantastic time there, returning home in the evening with lots of things to tell me about what they had done.  :)

Meanwhile, Moriah and Benjamin and I stayed home and had a relaxing afternoon that included naps, some one-on-one time for me with each of them since they didn't nap at the same time, snuggling and reading books on the couch, some episodes of Adventures in the Book of Virtue and 64 Zoo Lane on YouTube, Moriah "helping" me do the dishes by rinsing them as I washed.  And then the boys came home!

There was one other advantage to our trip being cancelled.  Today bright and early was the time to enter baked goods in our county fair, and the boys and I all wanted to enter something.  A few things could be made on Saturday evening, so we did that, but we knew we still had some baking to do on Sunday night if we were going to have it ready in time on Monday morning.  Because we didn't go to PA, we didn't get home terribly late; and because we didn't get home terribly late, we got an earlier start on our baking; and because we got an earlier start on our baking, we got more sleep than we would have otherwise!  So it all worked out for good.

It always does.  :)

But we surely missed seeing Uncle David and his family and look forward with even greater anticipation to the next time we get to visit with them!!!  :)