catch up and poo

for those of you who may be wondering, i did get pablo back whole & pointy. i had to demand proof of life before i paid the ransom & since i was pretty sure that the picnapper wasn't much of a newspaper reader, i requested that i get a photo of pablo with a fresh vegetable. this is what i got on my phone. doesn't that file look deadly?

after that, of course i had to rush in to rescue the little guy, but i was barely in the nick of time as you can see here.

i think some of us were just glad to have something other than funeral arrangements to think about & laugh over that day. and pablo was returned to my purse pocket with a smile on his face.

our trip up north was actually really great. i got a chance to see & visit with so many of my relatives who i rarely get to see or enjoy and if you were a neighbor who didn't know better, you might have thought we were all gathered for a party rather than a funeral because of how much laughing and story telling we did out in front of grandma's house. there were certainly plenty of sad moments, but we all seemed to agree that we should focus on the good rather than the sad.

brooke came down with strep while we were up there & spent the last 3 days feeling really bad most of the time. she slept a lot & barely ate anything. i'm not sure if you know this or not, but strep often comes with stomach problems as well as throat pain & fever.

having stomach problems while traveling in a car for 14 hrs really isn't a great way to spend the day. yesterday morning started out rough with some distressing belly behavior on brooke's part while we were still at the house. then we got everything loaded into the car, including our cranky selves at 8am and went straight to a grocery store to buy some special hot dogs for my sister back home. i'm not sure what's special about them, but it was important enough that we carried a cooler with us just to be able to cart them home again.

mom & i ran in the front door of the store ready to grab up the dogs & hit the road. we asked the employee at the front door to direct us to the biggest packs of hot dogs the store carried. we bought up 10 lbs of them & scooted back out the door again, feeling good that we hadn't wasted much time. when my dad drove around to pick us up he told me that brooke had unfortunately had a little accident while we were in the store. ooookaaay. so much for making this a quick stop.

i dug through the trunk in an effort to locate some clean shorts & undies for my poor sick girl & then ran back into the store, pulling her by the hand. i asked the same employee for directions to the bathroom and then we marched our smelly parade over to the ladies room.

i was in the process of cleaning and bagging things up in the stall when i talked to my mom on her phone & decided that things would be easier if we had some moist, flushable butt wipes. i didn't want to leave brooke alone, so mom came back into the store & asked that same friendly employee for directions to the booty wipe aisle. she went through the line with her second purchase in 5 minutes, told the cashier she wouldn't need a bag & then walked straight past her & into the bathroom.

while we were hanging around the ladies room, we discussed what we were going to do to prevent the whole trip from becoming a day-long car pooping bonanza. she's too big for diapers or pull-ups. too small for depends. oh wait, there's a type of pull-ups now available in bigger kid sizes for those who still have bed wetting issues. that sounded like the perfect plan that would give us all peace of mind & butt and hopefully enable our trip to be less stressful for all involved.

so mom ran back out to the lady by the door & asked for directions to the diaper aisle. of course she then toted her $15 pack of giant pull-ups into the bathroom right away, no doubt leaving the helper & the cashier wondering and concerned about what the heck was happening in their bathroom. in the span of 10 minutes we went through that front door 4 times, each time needing something very specific and progressively alarming.

in the end the pull ups weren't needed, but at least we had that peace of mind knowing we were covered just in case. and we all had a really good laugh in the car, telling our sharting stories and imagining what the grocery store employees were telling their friends later that day.