Monday, September 7, 2009

Vacation 2009 - Day 1 and 2

Well, not even sure how to start this saga.
We have been gone for 12 days, visited 7 states, 2 provinces, 2 countries, drove 3000+ miles, visited the Instacare twice, had car problems, visited with family, played on the farm and all sorts of fun things. So here it goes ....
Day 1: We started off the day driving to San Fransisco via Reno and Sacramento. Along the way we had to stop often to feed children, potty children, calm children down, stop children from arguing, answer questions from children, and finally, medicate children.
At our first rest stop this is what we found:

This made me especially glad we stopped. That was a quick stop for obvious reasons.
Next stop was the Bonneville Salt Flats. We had never been and the boys wondered why there was "ice" on the ground in the middle of summer.

We really didn't stop much for pleasure after that. Gage had been sick the night before with a fever of 102 degrees, so he got very little sleep and made sure that mom and dad had very little sleep. McCall, who had never travelled more than an hour at a time, was an absolute dream! She was so good to travel, we can't say the same for her older brother.
Gage continued to be extremely grouchy, he refused to eat anything and any time he did he would scream and yell and carry on. I was getting a little tired of it pretty quickly. But he continued. We finally made it to San Fransisco and decided to get to bed. But Gage kept us up all night again. He wouldn't sleep more than a half an hour at a time, and that was if we were holding him .... soooo sleeeepy. We discovered sometime during that night that he had HUGE canker looking sores in his mouth, all over his tongue, his cheeks, the roof of his mouth etc. That explained a few things.
Ryan had work meetings in the morning, poor guy, on so little sleep, oh well, I had four kids in a hotel room so I had a very hard time feeling too badly.
I knew that I couldn't stay in the hotel all day with four kids so I decided to take them to the San Jose Children's Discovery Museum, via the local Walgreens of course where I stocked up on Orajel, Anbesol and any other relief I could find for Gage.
We had a great time at the museum. They boys played for hours in the boxes building forts, blowing bubbles, creating corn husk dolls, painting each others faces and all that fun stuff. Gage was able to have some fun, but it was interspersed with outbreaks of screaming and crying. I got many strange looks, possibly because I was one of the few parents there with more than one child, or perhaps from Gage's antics. Amazingly I found our way back to the hotel where the kids were able to take an hour nap. Blessed hour.

Gage continued to scream and not eat so we took him to a local Instacare. They said he had Aphus (I think) Ulcers in his mouth. They prescribed him some oral paste to help clear everything up. $200 later we were on our way back to the hotel with a still screaming child who refused to let us put anything on his mouth. Another sleepless night ensued.

To be continued....

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