On Friday night all 3 kids stayed up until 10pm watching the light show from our yard. Yes, really. There were so many fireworks being sent up just in our neighborhood that we didn’t even have to leave the property. It was very exciting. Oh, the jumping! The screaming! The glee!

We are still paying for it, though. Saturday morning T-Bot and Baby Sister slept in until 7.15, a measly 30 minutes over our previous record. So we had time to kill before it was time to drive Aunty B to the airport, where she was catching a plane to Mexico. I hoped they would sleep in the car during the hour-long ride but only The Wictor did, and he had been awake since 6.30. 

And then he was rudely awakened by Baby Sister’s screeches when we arrived at Terminal E and Aunty B took her suitcase out of the trunk. Baby Sister did not want to lose her friend Auntie B, and rightly so. Because she was tired, her pain was multiplied. She screamed all the way home.

When she had been through a few thousand repetitions of “I want Aunty B! I miss Aunty B!” she lost McDonalds Playplace privileges, so she switched to “I don’t want to drive thru! I wanna go to the Playplace!” And then she alternated. When her conditions did not improve she brought out the big guns. “I don’t wanna live with you any more! “ 

In the meantime we missed our freeway intersection. Then the next available route. And a third, which meant we had to do a U-turn. By the time we got off the freeway The Daddy was so frazzled he declared he couldn’t even cope with the drive thru. So we switched places and I drove, but I was so stunned I couldn’t remember the way home. 

By the time we found our house, after one and one half hours of wailing , the likes of which I have never heard and hope never to hear again, Baby Sister was running out of steam. 

“Mommy, I am sorry,” she whimpered, staring up at me with big damp eyes, “it’s so hard to be good and not scream, when you miss Aunty B and want to go to the Playplace. “ 

What could I say? Just like that, all was forgiven. 

And last night was an early bedtime, for all.