Traveling Circus, Jetta Style, Part Two

It took five hours to go from Hot Springs to Memphis. On a good day of traveling, it should take about 3 1/2 to 4 hours. My overnight stop was set in Knoxville, which is seven hours from Memphis. The odds were not looking good for us the first day. I stopped at least half a dozen times to buckle children back into their restraints, namely the Caelan trunk incident. By the time we reached Knoxville that night, I was more than ready to be done. And yet I faced another full day of driving.

McKenna began the trip by moaning, yelling and crying. And she did this for an hour. Mother insanity set in well before the trip was well underway. Claustrophobia set in, the Jetta shrinking around me. The din of McKenna carrying on combined with two sisters yelling at her because they were equally as fed up with her as I was, threatened to bring this circus to a screeching halt. I don't handly whining/crying/yelling very well but I refused to pull over. I had stopped too many times the day before. There was not going to be a repeat performance of that, circus or not. Things did calm down and a couple of them drifted off to sleep. The hours and the miles passed easily, with one traffic incident in Virginia. By the time I made it to Winchester, Virginia, McKenna was resigned to her seat... for the most part. She still had random spurts of anger. If I understood all her  baby babble, I'm pretty sure she was yelling profanities at her carseat while hitting it violently.

At one point, Chaucer had moved to lay between Caelan and McKenna, his back to Caelan and his face and paws toward McKenna. That dog put his paws on McKenna's carseat. She came unglued, yelling at him to get his paws off. For the next thirty minutes, Chaucer would put his paw on her carseat for the reaction and then remove. It was like having another kid in the back seat. She was furious. He kept right on teasing her until finally he decided to put a stop to it by put his entire leg across her body, pinning her shoulders back against the seat. She was livid. And I was laughing. Shoving his leg off, she began a tirade against him. Whatever she was saying, she was not joking. She covered him with her books, blanket and pillow. Out of sight, out of mind... or just complete vengeance on the dog. She won. He got up and went to the trunk, where he stayed for the last two hours of the trip. Those last two hours were very calm for McKenna. I think she finally got all her frustrations out.