Family Fun

 

 

 

 

Family Fun in Abilene

                                                                        By Judy

 

“How about we take a mini-vacation next weekend?” I asked my husband one fine summer day. That was how the weekend in Abilene began. I was excited to visit the birthplace of Dwight D. Eisenhower.  My parents and grandparents were strong Republicans, and I remembered listening once or twice to President Eisenhower speaking on the radio. My neighbors across the road even had a picture of Ike on their wall.

I have no memory of the long drive to Abilene so perhaps it was uneventful. The children were three-months-old, three, seven and ten. My husband and I were thirty-four and thirty-five. (Still young enough to think we could conquer the world or at least survive a weekend trip with the kids.) There would have been several bathroom breaks, a couple of stops for the carsick child to vomit and maybe a stop or two to change drivers when the non-driving person might have been too vocal about the other driver’s driving skills. It was, no doubt, a fairly typical road trip for our family. What I do remember is this.

“Mom, I don’t feel so good,” my seven-year-old daughter said about a minute after we entered the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

“Are you going to throw up?”  I asked. (That was my go-to-response anytime a child told me they didn’t feel good.)

 “No, but my throat hurts, really bad, too,” she answered in a hoarse whisper.

We did not take many trips when the children were little, and I had looked forward to this weekend. I was not going to let a little sore throat put a damper on our family fun. “You can ride in the stroller,” I told the seven-year-old.  “Your father can carry your little brother, and I’ll carry the baby.” Lucky for me I had brought one of those pouch-type carriers for him. At first, the seven-year-old was embarrassed to ride in the stroller, fearing someone would laugh at her arms and legs dangling over the edges. Needless worry on her part, though, as soon she was asleep, face down on the tray of the stroller.

After a day touring the grounds, my husband was exhausted from pushing the stroller and chasing a three-year-old. My back ached from carrying the baby in the kangaroo pouch, and my ten-year-old daughter was very, very bored. And, she had been very, very vocal all day about how very, very bored she was. The seven-year-old felt great, having rested most of the day in the stroller. “I’m hungry,” she said. Can we get pizza?” she asked. Pizza did sound good. I thought it might be just what we needed to refresh us all.

“Two medium pizzas, one Pepperoni and one sausage. And, bring us a pitcher of Pepsi, please,” I said. We happily colored our placemats while waiting on our order. Our food arrived, and I was pouring the pop into the first glass when one of the children accidently bumped my elbow. The spilled, swiftly flowing brown beverage quickly blurred our brightly colored placemats into muddy-looking blobs. The nice waitress brought us new ones, though, and another pitcher of Pepsi.

One of the children (memory fails me which child it actually was) reached across the table to “borrow” a sibling’s red crayon, and accidently bumped the second pitcher of Pepsi. Again the waitress brought us towels and a third pitcher of Pepsi. I did notice she didn’t seem quite as pleasant this second time. Nor did she replace our placemats. I’m a little unclear as to exactly how the last pitcher of Pepsi got spilled. I just remember I grabbed the baby, my husband picked up the three-year-old, and we told the girls to run for the car.

The “baby” is now thirty-three, but sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m still haunted by that waitress’s look of shock. I’m not certain if we paid for the pizza or all that Pepsi either. In fact, I kind of remember going through McDonald’s drive-through on the way back to the room. Needless to say, it was several years before we ventured to the Truman Library.