Diary of an Angry Pink Baby #6: Mt. Jackson, VA 2012

James hates being in the car. While this is not a singular hatred, it is a strong one. He will reluctantly tolerate the car during nap-time or bed-time, but during any other time, he views the car as an affront to his God-given right to stumble around, before smashing his head into something. If the car seat allowed James to smash his head into something, he would only hate being in the car as much as he hates being told he can't eat a cardboard box. Eating boxes, he loves.

In no particular order, James's favorite things to eat are sweet potatoes, whatever is on your plate, books, bananas, and cardboard boxes.

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How James looks when he is displeased

We had a good idea for my Spring Break. The good idea was seeing our friends in DC and Virginia, which my wife has written several thousand posts about in the past 36 hours. The bad idea was coming back to New York.

We got as far as the Shenandoah Valley, which is not far at all, when James realized what a bad idea his parents had dreamed up: eight hours in a car, many of which would happen before bedtime? And that's the best-case scenario? No, James said. At his urging, we stopped in a Virginia town nobody has heard of, whose biggest green space consisted of a thin strip of grass between a busy street and active train tracks. I was willing to see how this played out, but my wife thought we could do better. In this instance, better consisted of a vineyard many miles out of the way that was closed.

Mount Jackson, Virginia

To be fair, there was no way of knowing the vineyard was closed, but James didn't see it that way. We weren't a mile from the abandoned parking lot when James offered every last drop of the two bottles he'd consumed, as well as several cheerios, as his counter to our vineyard jaunt. I pulled off the road onto a very rocky driveway. I stepped out of the car, and my wife handed me James. He looked like he'd been attacked by a fire extinguisher. He looked he was having a bad time at a foam party. The only place he didn't have vomit was inside his veins. When I put him on a flat stone to change him, he rolled into the red Virginia dirt.

Did I anticipate that eleven months into fatherhood I would be scraping vomit out of velcro shoes in a West Virginia Chick-fil-a? I did not. Yet this is what I was doing. I would like to say that things got better, and it's true that this was the nadir of our trip, but things didn't get THAT much better. James never forgave us, I was tired with hours to go, and my wife was wearing a tremendous amount of regurgitated Similac.

Spring Break woo!