Westward Bound

We left on Friday morning, bound for South Dakota, at about 8:30 am. I loaded up both boys, dropped Elijah off at daycare and Alex and I headed West, with my coworker Ben. The trip started out well, we made it to Worthington in what seemed like no-time. Alex ate snacks and played with his action figures in the car and seemed as if he was tired enough to fall asleep. We stopped for a fast food breakfast, maybe not our best idea, it filled us up all day long and then put gas in. Prior to hitting the interstate we set up a movie for Alex to watch on the computer...

...Here's a little back-story: Thursday night we headed out to Target to pick up snacks for our trip and to get a DVD player for our car ride. Jeremy decided that it didn't seem worth the extra money to purchase a DVD player when our laptop would work just fine (understandable at that time...)

We soon found out that the laptop was close to running out of batteries, meaning we quickly plugged it into our power inverter. We soon found out that there was some technical difficulty between the charger and the power inverter, meaning the laptop was soon to die. We had to tell Alex that the DVD was not going to happen. As you can imagine, I was really wishing I could go back to the night before and purchase the DVD player.

I was able to calm Alex down with another snack and a new book that we bought the night before. However, this was quite short lived...Soon he was continually fussing in the back that he wanted to watch a movie. I was able to talk him down by telling him that we could get his Leapfrog TAG reader out, and he could read some books. We found all the books in the bag I strategically put right between the seats, however the TAG was nowhere to be found!

I continued to drive, with the little sanity I had remaining hanging by a thread, and put Ben on a search to find out where the nearest Walmart, Target or Shopko would be. We found out that Mitchel had a Walmart and was about 30 minutes away by this time. I kept my cool and looked forward to the upcoming stop.

As we pulled into the parking lot, I was sure the people inside the store could hear Alex crying. I ran as fast as possible to get the DVD player. I soon found that the DVD player Target had on sale was $35 more expensive at Walmart, they said they wouldn't price match, oh yeah and I forgot to mention, Thursday night we used a 10% off coupon for Target too! I decided to skip it since there was such a price difference and looked at a cheaper one, it was sold out. I had to go with my third choice, a lower quality one, and left rather frustrated. On my way out the door I decided to purchase a TAG reader as well, thinking if I got desperate I would open it and sell it on ebay when we got home.

I got to the car, set up the DVD player...IT NEEDED TO CHARGE!!! I tied Alex over with MORE snacks, and turned the DVD player on as soon as I could. It was like magic, once the movie was on, he was quiet!

While he was entertained with the movie I quietly opened the TAG to get it ready in case of emergency, soon to find there were no batteries! I set it down on the floor, never to open it again (Jeremy returned it today).

The rest of the trip out West went well, and Alex was a trooper. As I told Ben throughout our trip, the fits he's having, I didn't blame him for. It was because of my technical errors that they occurred. Our trip took longer due to unexpected stops, but we were able to make it in about 11 hours, just in time to see Traci prior to her rehearsal.