Au Revoir, Mes Amis

I'm leaving on a jet plane an excruciatingly long car trip. We're headed to the nation's capital to freeload off my sister for a week. I may post a blog entry or two next week, if you play your cards right.

I'm looking forward to the vacation itself, but the car trip . . . not so much. We did purchase a new DVD player after the last one passed away. So, a few dozen viewings of "The Little Mermaid" should keep the wee one moderately entertained on the trip. (As an aside, has anyone ever noticed that Ariel is only 16 when she gets married? It always surprises me that no one ever raised a ruckus over that, since ruckuses have been raised over far lesser things.) I wish we'd had a DVD player when I was a kid. Instead, you had no choice but to sit in the back of your mom's Monte Carlo and punch your sister (and, once got so mad that you pulled out a chunk of her hair and hid it under the seat, but . . . you didn't hear that from me).

Aside from the challenge of keeping a small child occupied for 16 hours, my other concern is with food. The rest stops along the way all seem to feature the same restaurants. ("Another TCBY and a Cinnabon? No way! What are the odds?") I'm packing some snacks from home in hopes that I'll be able to resist the "I'm on vacation and therefore can eat myself into a stupor" trap. However, I do need to indulge in a few of the items that I can get in the DC area (where I grew up):

• Entenmann's Chocolate Chip Cookies (I can get the doughnuts where I live, but not the other stuff for some reason)
  
• Utz's Barbecue Chips
  
• A chocolate chip cookie from Larry's Cookies
  
• Pizza from Bugsy's in Old Town Alexandria

As you can see, I'm pretty much a health nut. However, I am determined not to gain more than a pound or two on vacation. I can pack on five pounds in a weekend if I set my mind to it, so gaining only a pound or two over ten days is no small feat.

So, I'll see you on the flip side! Oh, and don't rob my house while I'm on vacation - my neighbor and her huge, vicious (probably rabid) dog are watching it for us while we're gone.

Band-Aids

The wound. We are pretty sure she will lose the foot.

When my sisters and I were growing up, we never knew where Mom kept the band-aids. To this day I do not have any earthly idea where she stored them. If any of us had an injury that (in our opinion) required a band-aid, we first had to show the wound to our mother. Basically, you had to be :::this::: close to needing stitches and then maybe, possibly, if the planets aligned just right, you could have a band-aid. Ideally, your wound had to be deep enough that she could see your internal organs when she peered into it. If you weren't actively bleeding, you didn't even bother asking for one.

If she did agree to dole out an adhesive bandage, she'd say "wait right here" and then go into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her. You'd hear combination locks spinning and deadbolts clanging and vaults opening and then a few minutes later you'd have your band-aid. And if you got it wet an hour later and it fell off . . . fuggetaboutit. You were done.

Now that I have an accident-prone child of my own, I think I understand why band-aids must be kept hidden. For starters, they're not cheap. Currently, I have Batman, Spongebob Squarepants, and Hello Kitty band-aids (of various sizes) in stock. A couple weeks ago, the kid wore some new shoes and was rewarded with a blister on the side of her foot. Now, she continues to insist that she is about to bleed out through this weeks-old owie.

"Mama, can I have a band-aid?" She pointed to the place where the blister once existed and where there was now just a tiny speck of disrupted skin.

"I'll think about it," I replied. (Translation: if we stop talking about it, maybe, for the love of God, she'll forget about it.)

Thirty seconds later: "Mama, I really need a band-aid."

"If you say 'band-aid' one more time you are going to time-out. Seriously."

I was kneeling down to help her dry off after her bath. She cupped my cheeks in her hands and pulled my face close. "Mama, would you just think about giving me a band-aid? Would you just think about that?"

A few minutes later, she was dancing around the living room, a Hello Kitty band-aid stuck firmly to her instep. Sometimes, my sanity is worth more than a band-aid. Makes me wonder about my Mom, though.