The trip to Florida where we "forgot" our little brother at a gas station.

I often struggle with starting these posts and today is no different. But for sure one thing I need to address is that my blog about the sibling fight got about 10 times the traffic that my blogs usually do. After a day up, I'll usually have about 50 views. This morning when I checked the post from yesterday was getting really close to 500. That's almost my most popular blog post but even then, the couple of posts with more views have been up for several months now. I don't know how blogger posts get seen by people but for whatever reason, a story about siblings torturing each other made it to a lot more readers than usual. I know in the grand scheme of things its a tiny amount but I still thought that was kind of cool. 

One thing I learned this week is that Tucson has a Rodeo Break. Yup, for however many years, the city of Tucson takes off two work days to attend the rodeo. It's not like everything is shut down but my kids are off school, my Ob/Gyn office is closed and lots of people take the days off.  I had completely forgotten until yesterday and to be honest I wasn't quite prepared to have to take care of the kids all day. My son loves to poke my daughter. If there is any measure of annoying that he can be towards her, he's all in. 90% of the time she wants no part of it. So all morning I've been the crazy, frazzled, pregnant mom making threats I have no ability to follow through on. I have them divided in their rooms now. My olive branch was that Abby can stay here when Bubs gets home at lunch and I'll take TJ to the air museum. A moments peace. Thankfully. 

My sisters loved the blog from yesterday and I'm very curious to see what Brian thinks. One of the things we could not remember is if Brian got in trouble for being the one we conned into swinging the belt. I'm pretty sure he did but I know for a fact he got off so much lighter than we did whenever he would do anything wrong. Since I hope he'll read this eventually, I'm going to dedicate a memory specifically to him where his three older sisters really did team up on him--just for the sole purpose of being mean. As I see in my own house, I guess kids never change. 

As long as I can remember, my family did a trip to the Gulf Coast at least once a year. Some of the years it would be over spring break, sometimes over the summer and I think we even went in the fall and early winter a couple of times. I knew we rarely stayed in the same town twice, some times it would be Alabama (the first bar I ever remember going into was the Flora-Bama, now sort of famous from MTV), some years it would be Pensacola Beach and I think one year we went as far as Panama City. This was actually a continuation of trips that my dad took with his family when they were kids so we would always have aunts, uncles and cousins around.  Those trips are some of the greatest memories of my childhood. 

Even though our trips were spread out through a huge area of the gulf coast, the drive out was always exactly the same. A short drive down a country road and then hours and hours...and hours...on I-10 until we got to where we going. We knew the gas stations we'd stop at. We knew exactly where our dad would start talking about his back being sore. We knew what my mom would say at the grocery stores about making sandwiches. Every year..."I just can't see spending $25 to feed a family at Subway when there's a grocery store in the same shopping center" as we were choking down Wonder Bread, Kraft cheese and boloney...which she thought was just as good.

I don't remember the exact year, I know Brian was still fairly little bit old enough to not have to be in a car seat, so maybe 5 or 6. As we were driving across Louisiana, Jess started telling him "Brian, I want to warn you there's kidnappers all across Mississippi. After we get gas and cross the border, you'll need to hide." Brian tried to play it off like he was too cool to believe her but he asked me and Jenn and we told him that yeah,  it's true but we loved him and we would try to keep him safe.  So as we got closer and closer to the Mississippi border we kept telling him that we would do our best to protect him but sounding more an more ominous as we got closer. little kid was in a state of pure panic when we stopped for gas at the last stop in Louisiana. 

After we got gas, went to the bathroom and loaded up our snacks for the rest of the drive, poor little Brian was nearly in tears panicking about what was waiting for him over the border. I had the great idea that we would all get in the third seat and we would sit on him for the rest of the drive and that way no kidnappers would see him. The poor kid was so terrified that he readily agreed. Our mom always fell asleep during this portion of the trip and our dad was always so into his "driving mode" that we thought we could probably torture he poor kid the rest of the way into Orange Beach. So for at least 20 miles our poor 5 year old brother was stuffed under his 15, 13 and 11 year old sisters as we could hardly contain our laughter. I was sitting on his head and kept saying my sandwich gave me a stomach so I was worried I was going to fart on him. Jess was kept pretending there was rough roads so she'd jump up and down on his stomach and chest and Jenn kept tickling his feet to "test" him to make sure he could be quiet in case we saw some kidnappers. 

We were having the time of our lives when all of the sudden our Mom sprung awake, looked around and said "Where's Brian?" She looked around and when she didn't see him she screamed "James!!! Turn around! We forgot Brian at the gas station!"  Our dad was jerked out his intense focus and gunned the gas for the next exit so he could get on the off ramp to head the other way on the interstate."  Jenn, Jess and I looked at each other like "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit." We did some silent communication and I think we all agreed that we would not say anything and hope that when we got to the gas station we could sneak Brian out so he could be "found."  My mom was in a state of pure panic envisioning her 5 year old son wandering around a Louisiana gas station by himself. She started screaming "James, give me your phone, I've got to call 911!" As soon as she she got the phone, from underneath me I hear a very faint little boy voice say "I'm down here Mom." 

My mom looked like heard a ghost...and she may have well have. I can only imagine the look on our faces as my mom looked back at us. We all look nearly identical as it is and I'm sure our white as a ghost expressions matched in that moment as well.  We were busted. 

Dad pulled over on the side of the road, Mom got out and opened the sliding door the van and in a calm voice that was waaaaay more scary than had she started yelling, she said "Let him up, now."  We sheepishly all propped ourselves up so he could crawl out and mom hugged and asked him why he let us sit on him. He was like a little parrot and he snitched on us in every way he could, we are actually lucky that he didn't make stuff up because we would have gotten in trouble for that too. 

Mom got Brian back in his seat and while still on the side of the road, she stood there in the open door of the van just staring at us for what seemed like hours. Finally she spoke and said "I don't want to hear a single sound out of you three until I'm ready to talk to you."  We rode in utter silence for the next few hours. 

As we pulled into the condos, our cousins came screaming up to us how excited they were and there were the cutest guys staying in the condo next door and we needed to get changed and come to the beach with them. My mom looked at them and said "sorry ladies, your cousins made a very bad choice and you may not see them for a couple of days." 

My cousins weren't kidding either, there was a group of gorgeous farm boys from Wisconsin staying in the condos next to us. I made eye contact with one of them as I was silently unpacking the car and it was love/lust at first sight. He had an insanely confident smile and I was smitten--spring break beach young love is one of the best things ever. 

After we got done unpacking our mom finally told us that she was ready to talk and she was pissed. She was mad about scaring Brian so bad about the kidnappers, she was furious about his lack of seatbelt, she was insanely mad that we didn't say anything as she was in panic mode and she just couldn't get over the mean streak that we had when we put our minds together.  We were grounded for the first two days of the vacation and we had to take over all the cleaning duties so the aunts got a break.  

That was one of the coolest condos we ever stayed at because it was right on the beach so for two days we had to see and hear our cousins playing on the beach and having a great time while we washed dishes, vacuumed sand and did grocery runs with the adults.  And of course that gorgeous guy wasn't waiting around, he ended up hooking up with my cousin Hannah. By the time we were set free, all the guys in the condo next door were spoken for for the week. No moonlight make outs and getting felt up for me! 

For his part, Brian loved being the minor celebrity with ultra mean sisters and ate up the attention. It took about 3 or 4 days for the adults to stop glaring at us and start to trust us with the younger cousins again.  

Ok adult Brian--this one was for you, you better read this now. And it really sucks that you answer my husbands texts in less than a second but I'm left on read for days and weeks.