Vacation: Now We're Home

We are home now from vacation. I am NEVER going to California with the kids again.

We discovered that the reason Sonshine's screen of our new dual-screen portable DVD player wasn't working was because he had bent three of the nine pins on the jack. When he had meltdowns on the way to California, he had kicked the back of the seat and pulled the cable out of his screen, and when he tried to plug it back in, he had it rotated wrong but he shoved it on anyway. This, by the way, would be the cable that I had to have specially made, at a cost of nearly $25 and an hour spent on the phone trying to find a firm in Salt Lake City that could make such a specialized cable for me in the first place. He also damaged the jack that the cable plugs into. Thus by means of his meltdowns, Sonshine managed to half ruin a brand new piece of electronic equipment.

His screen rendered useless, Sonshine had nothing better to do on the trip back than pester Bagel the entire way. Bagel started screaming, but he also gives as good as he gets, so then Sonshine started screaming. Knuckles, who's sensitive to noise, started screaming from all the noise. Princess, who was still trying to watch the movie through all this screaming, made a tent over her screen out of her blanket, which further enraged Sonshine because now he couldn't see the one working screen at all. Then FH started screaming at the kids, and I started screaming at FH to calm down before he ran us all off the road. I think my hearing is permanently impaired.

I hope I never have to eat another meal at a restaurant with my family again. Eating with them is like trying to eat while conducting a science class in the monkey enclosure of the local zoo during the aftershocks of an earthquake. The table is shaking from Sonshine kicking it, Bagel is trying to poke you in the butt while climbing the side of the booth (a feat only he seems capable of pulling off), Knuckles is trying to grab your roll (to which he is violently allergic) and the whole time Princess is questioning you about the intimate details of the life cycles of frogs or the theological implications of various events in the Book of Mormon, or some other such topic.