I should have listened...

...to that little voice in my head. The one saying "step off, mama, your kid can't handle this." I had to wait a few days before writing this post to put some time in between the actual day I'm about to recount and the recounting of said day. I had to post the cutesy peek-a-boo pictures first to remind myself how sweet and funny and cute my kid is 95% of the time. Because just the other day, the 5% of him that isn't sweet and funny and cute met Murphy's Law and it wasn't pretty.

My extended family was having a Labor Day picnic about an hour from our house, and we were really looking forward to going. It was a holiday weekend, the weather was holding out, the food was going to be fantastic and the company even better. Multiple times leading up to that day, I shrugged off the inner voice saying "are you sure that's a good idea? There won't be anywhere for Sweets to nap." I am a fanatic about sticking to Sweets' nap schedule. That rigidity is born of months and months of him being a crappy sleeper until we finally established a routine that works. And he's not a "go with the flow" kind of kid. He wants to nap in a dark room, in a crib, at the prescribed time. But, I reasoned with myself, there are times you have to make it work. You can't sit in your house all day, every day just because your kid would miss a nap. 

So we ultimately decided we would leave in the morning shortly before his naptime and hope that he would sleep in the car on the way there. This is always a risky proposition. You run a 50% chance that he'll slide uneventfully into an mph-induced dreamland, and a 50% chance that he'll cry so hard he nearly vomits on himself. Unfortunately for us, the odds were not in our favor that day. 50 minutes into our less-than-enjoyable trip, I was having the following dialogue in my head: "It's ok, it's ok, we're only 10 minutes away. You can make it 10 minutes. You can do anything for 10 minutes. You labored for 13 hours with this kid. 10 minutes is nothing." And then we hit a detour. And I wished I was in labor instead of in my car with my child who was screaming mind-numbing, blood-curdling screams because he was in his carseat and not his crib. I wanted to throttle the road crew who closed some stupid bridge and weren't even there working on it. A good 25 minutes later, we arrived at our destination, frazzled but relieved. Sweets was ecstatic to get out of the car. His euphoria lasted all of 5 minutes before his mood headed quickly south to The Bad Place. You moms know the place I'm talking about. He wanted everything and he wanted nothing, all at the same time. The Bad Place looks something like this:

"Put me down, put me down! Mommy! How dare you put me down!"
"I want that truck, I want that truck! Get that truck away from me!"
"Juice, juice, I need juice!" :::Furious hurling of juicebox:::

And there we lived for the next 4 hours. I felt like the worst mom ever. Finally, battle-weary and simply done, Hubs and I packed it up and called it a day, praying to God that Sweets would sleep on the way home. No. Such. Luck. What we got on the way home was an even more infuriated display of emotion than we got on the way there. And torential, blinding rain. Plus the detour. That we tried to go around and failed.

And so the moral of the story is: your mama voice exists for a reason. Don't doubt it.

Do you have a disastrous mommy story?