Is It Even a Trip Home Without Some Shenanigan Stories?

Jakob and I road tripped home (Ohio to Texas) a couple weeks ago with Stella. We've been planning this since I got pregnant. We were going home to get Stella baptized at our home parish, St. Peter's, where we both got all our sacraments, including marriage. We decided to drive so that we could get the last haul of stuff that hadn't made it to Texas yet. The only things of ours still in Ohio are the American Girl Doll stuff my grandparents got me, but Stella won't be able to play with that for a while anyway.

The road trip was somewhat of a bust. We only actually stopped at The Starr Family Home State Historic Site, DeGray Lake Resort State Park, and Hatchie National Wildlife Refuge and of those Jakob only actually liked the DeGray Lake Resort State Park and the wildlife refuge. The original plan was to stop in Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Bone Lick State Park, and another park in Kentucky. We skipped through Little Rock because the place looked sketchy as hell. Jakob kept commenting how glad he was he brought his gun. We planned to stay the night in Memphis but when we got there, we quickly realized that all the hotels had gated parking lots, which made Jakob very uneasy, so we once again moved on. We drove around downtown Nashville, but it was pouring rain, so we elected not to get out and carry Stella through the rain. On the last day, we realized the one park in Kentucky was just a normal town park. The only thing remotely cool were the retired aircrafts from wars, but that wasn't something we wanted to stop and look at. The timing worked out so that we weren't going to get to Bone Lick State Park before dark, so we just powered on all the way to Mansfield. We arrived at 3 am on Monday, a day earlier than we had expected to. I didn’t actually get any photos on the trip because my phone was out of storage, and I thought it was still saving photos to snapchat but evidently not.

On the last leg of the trip Jakob started feeling weird. He kept talking about how his ears wouldn't stop popping and he felt like there was a lot of pressure in his head. My ears weren't popping but I didn’t realize he was getting sick. Monday morning, he took his temperature, but it was normal, so we assumed it was allergies.

Monday, we took Stella over to see Jakob's grandpa since he hadn't met Stella yet. Of course, he loved her, like everyone does. Afterwards we headed to order Stella’s baptism cake and we went to a thrift store downtown to look for some shorts for me. I’m too big for my pre-pregnancy shorts and too small for my maternity shorts. The dressing rooms were closed because you know how COVID loves to breed in dressing rooms. Even though their dressing rooms are literally just curtains they’re not even a confined space. Gotta love common sense. *Insert eye roll* I wasn’t about to buy shorts with no return policy without trying them on, even if they were only $2 each. I grabbed my 12 very-differently sized shorts and headed to the back of the store. I stood behind a clothing rack and started trying on different shorts. About 75% of them I couldn’t even get halfway up my thighs. About halfway through I realized I was dressing in front of a glass door. *Face palm* I moved over slightly and was able to find four pairs that fit. One of them was way too long and I had to cut off then fold up a few times, but I made them work. The other three are borderline too small because I wear things that fit like a second skin.

Monday evening, we headed to have dinner with some friends who lived in Heath. We thought Heath was right outside of Columbus so estimated an hour for travel. Turns out, while it is right outside of Columbus it’s right outside the FAR side of Columbus, so we were a half hour late. When we got to the restaurant we went inside, and our friends had gotten Stella one of those wooden baby seats. It was a nice gesture, but if we’d tried to use it, she would have just slumped down into a glob…

By the time we got back to Jakob’s moms that night Jakob was feeling pretty bad with a headache and body aches and I was asleep in the passenger seat. We were running on only 4 hours of sleep. We figured Jakob would feel better after a good night’s rest, but no such luck. The next morning, he woke up with a fever of 100.2. Jakob stayed at his moms all day for a movie marathon and Stella, and I embarked in the truck. You know Jakob's really sick if he’s letting me drive his new truck…

I told Parker, my nephew, we could do whatever he wanted to do to celebrate his birthday. He chose the pool and the trampoline park. I left Stella at home with Alexis (my sister), a bottle, and some breast milk, and headed to the pool. When I get out of the pool, I found a series of text in my mom & sisters group chat.

“She likes her bassinet.”

“I don’t know what she wants she won’t stop crying I’ve done everything.”

“She likes the crinkly cactus.”

“She’s crying again…”

When I got back, I nursed Stella then we headed for the trampoline park. I lasted about 5 minutes before my 6-and-a-half-week postpartum body started rejecting our plans. My legs felt like they were going to give up and I was so out of breath. Parker kept asking me why I was so out of breath. I said, “Parker... I haven’t done any physical activity in like ten months.” He then proceeded to try to get me to do a belly flop into the foam pit. I had to explain that since I was nursing that would be incredibly painful for me. Especially since I’d barely nursed all day.

Wednesday, Jakob’s fever was gone but he decided to stay home until he was 24 hours fever-free especially since he still wasn’t feeling great. He slept on the couch Tuesday and Wednesday night. On Thursday we moved all our stuff to my mom’s house to stay for the second half of the trip. Jakob was feeling better, so we felt like we were safe for the three of us to share a bed again. Friday morning Jakob still had a bad headache and has a barely-fever of 99 so my mom suggested he go to urgent care to check for strep. They did a COVID test, and it came back positive, unsurprisingly. I don’t trust the test results but, in this case, Jakob did have some COVID symptoms, so I trusted the positive was accurate. Sure enough, he lost his taste and smell like two days later. Although we’d all already been exposed, we wanted to minimize the risk, so Jakob stayed in the guest room he’d already slept in almost exclusively for the rest of the trip and Stella and I moved into the other guest room. Jakob spent his quarantine binge watching the all of the Twilight movies, which if you know Jakob isn't really on theme so it's pretty hilarious that was his choice.

Ya know how thing come in threes? Yup, there it was. The third big life event F’d by COVID. First the last semester of my college career and my college graduation, secondly our wedding, lastly Stella’s baptism. We had to call the church to figure out how they wanted to handle it and text all 200 guests invited to the sip and see (baby shower post-birth) and baptism parties to let them know. It was decided we would have a separate baptism just immediate family later in the day, instead of right after mass with the other four families. Mom’s turnout wasn’t too awful, there was like 10 people out of 36 invited, but dads was a disaster. We’d gotten food for 70 people. There was a total of 6 guests that came and including our family 18 mouths to feed. Needless to say, there was a lot of leftover food. Some of it went to Harmony House (an organization for homeless people), some of it went to mom’s house, 75% of the cake went to Jakob’s moms house along with food, food went to Jakob’s grandparents’ house, and dad and Patti still ended up freezing two giant tins of food.

The one night mom, Lex, and I had a girl’s night with mom’s friend Diane and went out drinking. We left Stella home with my sort-of-unofficial stepdad. After the whole COVID and baptism disaster I was ready to let loose. The first thing I said as we sat down for dinner was, “alright what do we want shots of?” Evidently it was too soon in the night for shots, but there were shots later on. For the first time since having Stella I actually got kinda drunk. Evidently my mom, Alexis, and Diane are like professional bar hoppers of Mansfield. They even knew a secret passageway through the alleys from the first bar to the second. At the second bar we ran into my uncle and cousin, so we had a couple drinks with them. After that Diane had to go and Alexis, mom, and I headed to “The Warehouse” to play giant Jenga. Let me tell you, this place was quite the dive. This is where the shenanigans went down. For one, there was a giant ladder hung on the wall as decoration at a slant. The whole night I kept saying, man I really wanna climb that ladder but was able to resist the urge… for a while. During the second game of giant Jenga Alexis and I were very unsatisfied with the music and headed over to the jukebox. It was $2 a song, or 6 songs for $5. Well turns out when you put a $10 bill in, they don’t give you change, so we ended up with 12 songs. It was 49% country, 45% Taylor Swift, 5% Oliva Rodrigo, and 1% Africa. When we got back from the Jukebox there was some guy sitting across from mom. We asked who he was, and mom said, “This is my new friend, I guess. He brought me a fireball shot.” I asked him where mine was, and he told me to go get two more. I asked him who’s tab it was going on and he told me his name. I went up to the bar and told them his name and they looked at me confused. I said, “I don’t know that’s what he told me his name was.” She said, “The redhead?” I confirmed this and she told me she had it, so I grabbed my shots and headed back. Upon returning I found out that 1. The guy had given me a fake name (at least the bartender knew who I was talking about) and 2. The first fireball shot was for some other girl who came over and yelled at mom, “that was my shot!” Apparently, some other girl also came over and said to mom, “man you’re so cute if Jake doesn’t take you home, I will!” Mom replied, “No one’s taking me home I have my own home!” The guy took the fireball shot with me then promptly fell asleep in our booth.

Later I went back to the bar to get Alexis and I each another drink and when I got back these bobo's were across the street. I assumed they’d gone out the door closest to us and opened it even though it said, “alarm will sound.” Luckily, the alarm didn’t sound, but I was made aware by the table near the door that mom and Alexis had actually climbed over the passthrough and out the giant window to go look at the moon. When they got back Alexis and I danced and sang at the top of our lungs to our songs we’d played, even though we were the only ones in the bar dancing and singing. The guy at our table, originally thought to be Josh but apparently actually named Jake, friends came and hauled him up and this girl who was with his group, who somehow figured out mom’s name, went up to her and said “JoAnn, are you done with Jake?” Mom said, “done with him?? I never started!?” She then proceeded to turn to me and talk about how great mom looked and asked me how old mom was. When I told her, even though she had said mom's name like 20x at this point, she replied, “what’s her name again?” Then turned to mom and told her, “JoAnn you look so great for your age! Jake is 31, he just thought you were the hottest thing though!”

After they left, I decided it was time to climb the ladder.

Somehow, I didn’t get yelled at, and luckily the thing didn’t fall off the wall. A few songs later, when London Boy by Taylor Swift came on, I decided it was a good idea to dance on a table. Let me remind you, no one in this entire place was dancing or singing.

Some guy playing pool came over and yelled at me and told me I had to get down, so I did, although the jury’s still out on whether he actually worked there or not. I want to put a disclaimer in that I was not drunk, at least not drunk enough to justify these types of shenanigans... I'm just like this.

While we were home, we decided to go to Kingwood Center Gardens with Stella in her buggy for a nice walk. The first time we went was right before mom’s baptism party, so we didn’t have time to sit down and have some wine. Alexis was very unhappy and informed us that was the only reason she came.

We decided to go another day too but this time we were smart and brought our own wine in our leftover Starbucks cups instead of paying for their overpriced wine. I regretted not getting a large like Alexis at Starbucks… I'd like to go on record the time the bow fell over her eyes was not the time we were drinking. And none of us even drank enough to get remotely tipsy, plus we were there for hours, so we were perfecty safe to drive home.

We were supposed to leave Sunday evening but didn’t end up leaving until Tuesday because we were waiting for Jakob’s headache to go away. We finally made it back home late Wednesday night and Jakob returned to work on Friday.

Overall, it was definitely a trip that went nothing like it was planned but still a great time. I was so pleased with how great Stella handled the long car rides. She loves riding in the car, and the cloth diapers and cloth wipes worked out great because I didn’t have to worry about finding a trash can when I changed her diaper. Everything just went in the wet bag. Although it was slightly inconvenient that we had to take a giant duffle bag for her that was 90% cloth diapers. It was also slightly inconvenient that when you stop the car she starts fussing so at one point I spent 20 minutes driving in circles at a rest stop to keep her asleep while Jakob used the restroom. The people at the rest stop either realized I had a baby or thought I was on drugs.