The most impressively bad idea of all

I have had some impressively bad ideas in my life. When I was a teenager, I decided pregnancy would be awful (I wasn’t entirely wrong), and I had the idea that if I ever wanted to have a kid, a surrogate would be ideal. But not a regular surrogate. I thought that would be too expensive and too messy, emotionally. My idea was to have a large dog, like a St. Bernard, gestate my fetus. I would keep the dog with me at all times, so I would be there for the baby’s development and know it was OK. Then the dog could have the baby for me, lick it clean, and I would go on to raise the child in a completely normal fashion. In college, I decided that was a pretty bad idea.

I got my driver’s license and a 1986 Ford Taurus with 100,000+ miles on it the day I turned 16 years old, which was in the middle of the summer. You don’t have a lot of forethought when you’re 16, so when fall and the first frost of the season rolled around, I hadn’t purchased an ice scraper (an essential item for a Midwest resident). My childhood home had no garage to protect from the elements, either. I needed to get to school, which started at the ungodly hour of 7:20 a.m., and I didn’t have time for the defroster to do its work. So I looked around and came up with the perfect solution. I grabbed a rock and started dragging it across the windshield. It didn’t do as thorough of a job as a standard ice scraper, but it cleared a good spot. Midway through my rock scraping, my mom - from whom I inherited my flakiness - came out onto the porch and said, “Do you need an ice scraper?” I held up my stone and said, “No, I’ve got a rock.” To which she replied, “OK, have a good day at school,” and went back inside. I did not realize what I had done until I drove home that day, and the hundreds of scratches on the windshield caught the afternoon sun. Needless to say, my dad was pissed. Rock-as-ice-scraper turned out to be a very bad idea.

Taking three No Doze pills at once when I had no tolerance for caffeine also was one of my more impressive bad ideas. Driving home from college once, I’d fallen asleep. I woke up on the rumble strips, and it was terrifying. I knew I could never let that happen again. I had one last final exam to take before leaving for Christmas break my sophomore year. I needed a D on the final to get an A in the class, but because I’m a chronic over-achiever, I pulled an all-nighter anyway. The test was at 7 a.m. By 9 a.m., I was ready for the three-hour drive home. I stopped for gas and went into the station and bought a box of No Doze. Let me preface this by saying I gave up caffeine at age 14 on the advice of my dance teacher. I didn’t and still don’t drink pop or coffee. Once or twice a year, I’ll have an iced tea. So I had absolutely no caffeine tolerance at all. The pills were packaged in pairs, so I assumed you were supposed to take two at once. I did. About an hour into the drive, I didn’t think they were kicking in, so I took another. Then, something started happening deep inside me, and I had to make an emergency stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. My bowels proceeded to explode, like the dress store scene in the “Bridesmaids” movie. At least I made it to a toilet. On the way out, I bought a pack of gum for 50 cents because I figured I owed the proprietors something for how I had just defiled their facility. It was a struggle to make it home before the same thing happened again. And again. And again. I lost six pounds in one day. I had multiple panic attacks. When the caffeine finally wore off, I slept for 15 hours. When I awoke the next afternoon, I passed out in the shower, my heart started palpitating and I went to the emergency room. I was diagnosed with severe dehydration and felt much better after I was pumped full of fluids. Even Jessie Spano would realize what a stupid idea the No Doze OD was. It turned out each pill had the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee, and I’d slammed three in an hour.

But none of those ideas can compare to my latest one in terms of sheer idiocy and utter awfulness. So what is this bad idea to trump all bad ideas? 

TAKING A TODDLER ON VACATION.

(And in case you were wondering, I did not gestate my baby in a dog. He was conceived, carried and birthed the standard way. Although throughout the process, I did occasionally pine for a St. Bernard surrogate.)

I spoke at and attended a conference in Orlando the week before last. It was four days, and I didn’t want to be away from my son for that long. Also, I thought it would be nice to vacation a little while there. So while booking everything back in the spring, I decided to tack three more days onto the trip and to take my husband and kiddo. My parents also came along for the first four days to help out with child care and have a little vacation, themselves. They wanted to drive for some reason and left two days before us.

My first indication that I had made a very big mistake was on the flight to Florida. It involved being confined in a small space for about three hours. You know what 18-month-olds find absolutely unacceptable? Being confined. Even though we didn’t have to, we bought him his own seat so he could move around. But it wasn’t enough. He did great on the ascent and descent, but in the middle of the flight, he just lost it. He wanted to run and climb, and there was turbulence, so he couldn’t. God bless the people behind us who did puppet shows with stuffed animals for him. And the people in front of us who, when we were getting off the plane, blatantly lied by telling us we did a great job and they could barely hear him. With all the frustration, we then left a very expensive board book from the library on the plane. 

We got to the hotel, and everyone was exhausted. My husband and I rented a suite so the baby could sleep in one room while we were up and about in another (he goes to bed at 7:30 p.m., and we didn’t want to tip-toe around in the dark for two or three hours). My parents had a different room. The hotel provided a pack-and-play, which we stocked with his favorite blankets and stuffed animals from home. We also brought his little projector that puts a picture of stars, moons, cows and sheep on the ceiling. We read him the same books we read before bed at home. Basically everything to make it as familiar as possible. Which means that he stood up in the pack-and-play screaming for two hours and refusing to go to sleep. That was especially great since I had to speak to 150 people from around the world the next morning. The next night he only screamed for one hour before falling asleep. Then about 15 minutes the next night. Things seemed to be getting better. 

Until he got sick. He barely ate one day, then woke up crying the next. It was the last day of the conference, and I was supposed to be at an 8 a.m. session. But he was inconsolable. He would stop crying for a few minutes only when I snuggled him in my lap and read to him. I couldn’t leave. He drank bucketfuls. He was so upset that I freaked out and had a full-on panic attack. I called our pediatrician at home and asked what to do. As I explained the symptoms to the nurse, she stopped me and said, “Wait. Mom, are you OK?” She even asked if I had someone there with me to help. Like she could tell from 2,000 miles away that I was not fit to care for a child at that point. After I calmed a little, she recommended we find a clinic there to make sure he didn’t have an ear infection or something. 

We did find a wonderful pediatrician’s office that took our insurance and could get us in at 2:15 that day. Which was right in the middle of my son’s very sacred nap time. So he was in a super great mood when I woke him up and made him sit in the car for the half-hour drive. (Praise Jesus we rented a car.) Apparently, his ears were so full of wax the doctor couldn’t see in them. I was afraid they were going to call DFS right there. I sputtered, “Our doctor told us not to stick Q-tips in there because he could jerk his head and we could hurt him.” The hot, young doctor guy with a thick southern accent assured me that was true, and that there was no need to clean out a baby’s ears unless you needed to see his eardrum, which unfortunately, he did. The response my son had to having wax scraped out of his ears was about the same as if he had to have a limb amputated without anesthesia. “Bloody murder” cannot even begin to describe the screams. The doctor ultimately determined it was just a cold with a pretty sore throat. He advised us to give the baby some ibuprofen and come back if he took a turn for the worse. I suspect it might have been RSV. This is a really severe cold that I didn’t even know about before having a baby. Anyway, I missed the entire last day of the conference dealing with baby illness and my own anxiety disorder. 

But with painkillers flowing through my kiddo’s little system, things started getting better. Copious amounts of snot soon followed, but he didn’t mind that in the least. He was content to just rub his nose with his hand and spread it all over his face, forming a crusty mask of boogers. He was feeling so good that we decided to go to Downtown Disney, which is an all-Disney retail area. (No way was I paying to take him to the real Disney when he can’t ride anything and won’t remember it). We came upon a Ghirardelli chocolate store that had some amazing ice cream sundaes on the menu. They were also huge. My husband and I got one covered in chocolate-chip cookies and shared it with our son. We figured it would feel good on his throat, and he hadn’t eaten much since getting sick, so we’d offer him something he couldn’t refuse. He ate it with amazing vigor. It might be the most I’ve ever seen him eat in one sitting. We were all stuffed after eating it and decided that was going to be dinner for the day. We went back to the hotel, put him to bed, and everyone was fat and happy. Until 11 p.m. My husband and I were asleep when we heard the baby start giggling. Then he started babbling, then whining. We tried putting him back to bed. Over. And over. And over. Because apparently sugar is to toddlers what caffeine is to grown-ups. Once he didn’t take a nap after eating a cupcake and ice cream at a birthday party, but that was in the middle of the day, so I didn’t care as much. Finally, at 3:30 a.m., I put on a bra and made a desperate escape to a CVS in my pajamas. I purchased children’s Benadryl. The clerk saw my disheveled state and what I was purchasing and said, “Rough night, huh?” I am not proud of drugging our child. But our pediatrician had told us in the past that we could give Benadryl to help with congestion, so I knew the safe dose. And he was congested. Mercifully, it worked, and he finally fell asleep about 4 a.m. He slept until about 9:30 the next morning. We then went to Sea World, and he slept through most of it in his stroller. I’m glad his admission was free. 

The last couple days of the trip weren’t that bad. And he actually slept for about half the flight home (no Benadryl, I swear - the flight just happened to be during his regular nap time) and was happy for the other half. It was however, probably the worst “vacation” of my life. And my most impressively bad idea to date.

My husband holding our son, who mercifully slept a good portion of the flight home. He looks deceptively darling and innocent here. I was jealous his dad got the sweet, sleepy snuggles, though.