It seemed like one thing after another went wrong this weekend. I will hit some of the highlights.

First off, almost as soon as we left Chicago, we had troubles. I was driving and Sara wanted to go to sleep. “We just stay on this until we get to 196, right?” I asked. “Right,” she said and fell asleep. 45 minutes or so later I pulled off to get gas at an oasis on the highway and Sara woke up. “There’s not supposed to be an oasis on the correct highway,” she said. Sure enough, I was not in fact supposed to “stay on this” until 196, I was supposed to get off onto another highway.

Okay, no problem, there was another highway coming up we could take to get back on track. I thought Sara said the highway I should watch for was 30. Eventually an exit came up and it seemed like the one I should take, except it said highway 31. “Is this the exit?” I asked Sara. I don’t know what she said, because I thought she said, “No.” So I drove past it. About 5 miles after the exit, Sara said, “We still haven’t come to the exit yet?” I was like, “I don’t know, I guess not.” And she was like, “The one we saw the sign for?” “The one you told me not to take?” “No, the one that I said to take.” So sure enough, that was our exit after all and we missed it by quite a long shot. This forced us to take a detour through the lovely city of South Bend which appeared to be the construction capitol of Indiana.

To top this off, Evie woke up while I was getting gas after only 45 minutes of napping. We had hoped she would sleep the entire trip, about 3 hours. So we had to deal with keeping her happy for almost 3 hours (since our little detours made the trip take quite a bit longer). And of course, this meant her shouting, “I’m going pee pee and poo poo!” (she’s learned that this is the phrasing that gets the most immediate reaction) every 15 minutes, forcing us to pull over and go into a bathroom, only to have her decide, “Nope!” and not go. She quickly realized the power she had over us, and used this tool to get whatever she wanted, such as the sock she threw up in the back window and couldn’t quite reach, because we had to put her socks and shoes on for a bathroom break.

That has to be it, right? As Evie would say, “nope!”

When we finally got there, we went to Festival and Evie had to use a port-a-potty. Apparently, someone stuck gum in there somewhere and I got it on my pants. Later, I was crouching down and the gum got stuck between my upper thigh and my calf so that when I stood up it stretched out like a big, gummy, extraneous leg tendon. So I had to walk around the rest of the time in this big crowd with bright green gum on my pants.

The next day, we were getting ready to go to a graduation party and Tom stopped me and said, “Your tire looks really low.” This didn’t come as too much of a surprise since my two front tires have been slowly leaking and needing air every couple of months. Luckily, Tom had a mini air compressor in his trunk, which was absolutely amazing, and we filled up the tires. However, as we were filling them, we noticed that A) they were completely bald, and B) there was an ugly bulge on one of the tires that looked like it was going to explode at any second. So before we left the graduation party, we switched the tires around so that the time-bomb tire was in the back instead of the front, so that when it inevitably blew out I would have a better chance at controlling the car. Luckily it did NOT blow out, but I had to drop some serious cash on a new pair of tires.

Add this to the general aggravation of getting Evie to put all her pee pees in the potty, and you have a lovely weekend! Actually, despite all the troubles, the weekend was pretty enjoyable. I guess we can chalk that up to not getting too stressed out about the little things in life!