Starry Nights=Bah Humbug

Reverse with me to New Year's Day.

Cooped up all day together, it finally dawned on me that a drive through the local park to see their light show was in order. You may remember that Emily had such a good time. You'll also see that Emily's mommy has much better skills with her camera than I do. (of course, they may have slowed down and perhaps even stopped to take a picture. You'll soon know why that was not an option for me.)

Before we got into the park, I had to pull off into the pitch blackness to rebuckle Elaine who had gotten loose. Seeing her loose made the boys think they could get loose, and we had mayhem. I pulled way off into the darkness and put the emergency lights on while I rebuckled, double buckled, lectured, and attempted to maintain my cool. The cop sitting at the entrance to the park had put me in a bit of a mood. When his lights started flashing behind us, my holiday spirit was officially spent. It was awesome when he walked up to the car and I couldn't remember how to roll down a window. Finally he lectured me kindly, admonished the children that mommy could get in trouble, and then gave us directions to get turned back around. Ben turned directly to everyone and announced that mommy was going to jail.

As we pulled up to join the rest of the world that had come to drive through this thing, the kids could not stop talking about--the moon. Yeah, the moon over there. I paid our 20 bucks to drive through the park after I realized there was no turning back. Twenty bucks? It was on the tip of my tongue at that point to argue the charge with the person standing there with a bucket, but I kept my trap shut. She gave me a ticket. I drove forward 10 feet and handed my ticket to another woman with a bucket, who then handed me a booklet of advertisements. I nearly began a lecture on the stupidity of that entire exchange but I kept my trap shut.

Determined, I flipped on some Christmas music after paging through the advertisements to see if they had a preferred station. (They didn't, but they could tell me where to purchase a very nice watch.) About 5 seconds into the choirs singing, Ben begins yelling from the back as if the sound is burning him: "Turn it OFFFFFF!" We then sampled every station on the radio until we landed on Classic Rock. I ignored the hot dog stand, determined to get this over with. As we crept along, about 2 minutes into it, more than one child started asking if we could go home.

There were no emergency exits on the Starry Nights trail.
When we were finally through the park, the children all conked out for the rest of the drive home. I shuttled them in one by one to the living room and snuggled them up on the couch, still drowsy.

"Mommy. I love you."

Well it wasn't all for naught then was it? Well that and all of the great pictures we got.