Family vacation - PART ONE

I was going to start with day one, but as it is with every vacation, the stress begins the day before with the preparations for the trip.
As it turned out, I still had several projects that I needed to finish for work before we strapped everyone into the vehicle and headed out to visit the grandparents.
I analyzed the situation and decided that if I worked all day and all night, I would be finished with my work and packed just in time to leave and my husband's goal time of 6:00 a.m.

Poor Husband. Every trip, he sets a time that he would like to leave, and we never leave when he wants to. We knew ahead of time that we would be making the 10 hour (drive time) trip in one day so we would need to leave early. As of Thursday afternoon, I was still on track to be ready to leave on time, but I neglected to remember that things never go smoothly, so naturally, my first work project took much longer than anticipated.

As we were eating dinner, I made a schedule in my head and realized that even if things went incredibly smoothly, we still would not be leaving on time.

Just then, a disagreement of some sort broke out between the children, so my husband took the opportunity to start singing "Love at home" above the arguing.

Unfortunately, this never stops the kids from arguing, but instead irritates them further, which caused my then-borderline headache to start on it's journey to full blown headache.
I looked at my husband and said, "Tomorrow morning, we're not going to be able to leave when you want to. When you're walking around at 7:00 a.m. all stressed out that we haven't left yet, do you want me to sing something to irritate you?"

He said that would be fine.

Then CJ says "Hey I know, I'll start singing "There is beauty all around when we're STILL AT HOME!"

(isn't he just precious?)

I then continued with my work projects which of course all took longer than expected.
All of the kids decided that they would stay up all night with me to help with the packing so I could get my work done. My husband went to sleep, because he is the designated vacation driver. (mostly because I always stay up the night before we leave.......)

After a while, Max says "So when dad is asleep now and we're all staying awake, he's stealing our sleep, but tomorrow when dad is awake and driving, we'll all be asleep and then we'll be stealing his sleep, right?"

Then he promptly fell asleep on the couch.

I put a blanket over him and we continued with our preparations. I let him sleep there and he woke up just before the sun came up, and was totally convinced that he had just "taken a little nap" and not slept a full 7 hours.

Already too long story short, I finished the last of my work at 9:00.
I showered, packed my stuff, helped jam everything into the back of the car, stopped at FedEx to ship the projects I just finished, we filled the gas tank and got on the freeway at 10:45.

11:30 we realized that we left the laptop sitting on the kitchen table.
No, we didn't go back for it.