Resiliency (aka Carsickness!)

RR has thrown up exactly three times in her whole life.

Once, she was really little – maybe a few months old?  The second time about a year ago after overindulging in grape tomatoes.  The THIRD time was this past Saturday, on a gravel pull-off on the side of a winding road that was leading us to The Maple Festival.

To her credit, the road looked like this:

And really.  Could you blame her?

She’s not a carsick kid.  In the car, she usually only chats about needing snacks, or something that’s fallen down where she can’t reach it, or for you to turn the radio volume up, but she’s content to look out the window and just ride along.

Somewhere on one of those turns (you’re getting carsick looking at it, aren’t you?), she complained that her tummy hurt.  Well, first she said it was hungry, so she had an apple and some apricots.  She may have been confusing hungry, though, with nauseous.  Fun with feelings!

Finally, she started crying.  That… cry.  That… “something is WRONG MAMA!” cry.  M’s dad pulled over at the nearest gravel patch.  I unbuckled her, M hopped out of the car to fetch her out, and as soon as the door closed… well, you can imagine.

RR cried afterwards, mostly because she was sad that she was now WET.  M’s coat, M’s hair, RR’s hair, RR’s … everything was covered.  We were all relatively calm, and opened the back of the car to clean everyone off with baby wipes and towels.  I gave M my jacket and we put RR’s spare pink jacket on her with no shirt on underneath.  M’s dad had some old rags in the back.  We calmly got everyone cleaned up.

She quickly fell asleep in the car and napped until we parked next to the All Things Maple Festivaly, only a few miles later.

She woke up with a start and a smile.  The color returned to her face, and she told us that she felt better.  Only about ten minutes later, she was sipping on a Capri-Sun, munching on some popcorn, taking a bite out of my BBQ sandwich, and playing balance beam with another little girl nearby.

The face of resiliency looks like this:

I’ll also add that my wife should get major resiliency points, too, for spending the afternoon with bits of digested apple in her hair.  Oh, and the washing machine gets two points deducted for having to take two loads to get everyone’s clothes clean.