I Just Want You to Know_ Letters to My Kids on Love, Faith, and Family - Kate Gosselin [15]
By lunchtime, we’d had enough and we headed to the parking lot. Back in the van, we stripped wet clothes off the kids and put on dry outfits from the stash in the van. Jon took his wet shirt off and thought he had an extra clean one. But when he pulled it out of his backpack, he discovered something had spilled on it. We distributed the lunches and took off for the long drive home—with Jon driving shirtless.
Just outside of Washington, I yelled at Jon to stop. “Look! There’s an organic grocery store.” I was always searching for organic foods and there weren’t organic stores near us. The kids were dry and happy and Jon was fine with stopping. I think the fact that there was a Starbucks across the street didn’t hurt either.
“Go in and see what you can find,” he said. “When you get back, I’ll throw my jacket on and run across the street and get us each a coffee.” The rain had subsided a bit, but I was still wet and the coffee sounded good (but when doesn’t it sound good to me?).
“I’ll be right back!” I was only in the store ten minutes, but as I came out the door I could see it was raining harder. On my way to the van, I noticed something disturbing; no one was in the driver’s seat! My first thought was that Jon was in the back with the kids, but as I rounded the corner I saw Jon standing in the parking lot, drenched! He had a horrified expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Look!” he said and opened the van door.
The smell hit before I saw it. Vomit. Vomit on Alexis who was in her seat and crying hysterically. Vomit on her car seat. Chunks dripping onto the floor mats.
The smell was overpowering. So was the sound. All of the kids were wailing because it smelled so bad.
“I…I don’t know what to say,” said Jon.
More important, he didn’t know what to do. He was paralyzed.
I grabbed Alexis and handed her to Jon. “Use the rain to wash her off.” He started stripping off her clothes. I reached under the seat for the lemon-scented wipes and tried to clean up her car seat. I wanted to take it apart but couldn’t because we were hours from home and she still had to ride in it.
Vomit was in every crack and crevice. The kids screamed and gagged. The heat and humidity combined with the putrid smell made me nauseous. We couldn’t open the windows because of the rain. I was worried more kids would start throwing up, so I handed them the only thing I had. “Hold the wipe up to your nose and breathe through it.” I hoped the lemon scent would somehow mask the smell, but if it didn’t, at least it would give them something to do.
As Jon stood in the rain, Alexis wearing only a diaper, sniffled in his arms. We were out of outfits, so we wrapped her in a blanket before putting her in her seat. Dripping wet once again, Jon and I got back into the van and looked at each other helplessly.
The kids fell asleep on the way home. I don’t know who was more ecstatic to pull into the driveway, Jon or I. Despite all our planning and preparation, we couldn’t have predicted the things that went wrong that day.
Had we known before we started, we never would have continued with the trip. But looking back, I am glad we had that experience. In some warped way, that horrendous day at the zoo gave us the confidence to attempt more outings. Though it was one of our worst trips ever, Jon and I agreed that if we could handle that we could handle anything.
By the time July rolled around, we were getting more adventurous. Grandmom turned sixty and we took Cara, Mady, Leah, and Joel to her surprise party. After that we had promised the kids another outing, but it was too hot to take the bus very far. We needed a backup plan or Mady and Cara would be the ones melting down. We needed to go somewhere that didn’t cost a lot of money and that we could handle logistically. That place was Chocolate World.
Chocolate World is Hershey’s visitor center,