Riding in cars with boys

Last weekend my parents invited the whole family to a lake house in Austin they had rented for the weekend. The vacation was great--filled with lazy days by the pool and shopping trips and lots of laughs together. But I don't blog about the good things--I blog about the ridiculous things, so I have to write about our time in the car.

Luckily for us, Austin is only a short drive away. It took about 2 hours to drive from our door to the door of the rental house. Unluckily, Carter was in a pretty bad mood on the trip there, and it was touch-and-go on the way back.

Jeffrey and I had one major thing in our favor: our son loves music. He perks up at the sound of singing, and it can calm most tantrums in seconds, so when Carter started crying approximately 10 minutes into our drive, mommy and daddy began our sing-a-long. We sang songs about frogs, ducks, itsy bitsy spiders, and (Carter's favorite) choo choo trains.

Happiness reigned in the car for about 20 minutes, but we hit a snag when he kept asking for more choo choo trains. We had sung 'little red caboose' 98 times, Jeffrey's sing song act from 2012 (train conductor theme), and 'I've been working on the railroad' ad nauseum.

When the chorus of "I nee mow choo choo TRAINS!" reached a decibel that warned of impending disaster---we got desperate.

And that's when we sang this highly inappropriate country song to our small child, together, in perfect harmony:

Well I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in the pick-up truck
She got runned over by a damned old train (we said 'dadgum' train, because that's how Christians curse)

And I'll hang around as long as you will let me
And I never minded standin' in the rain
And you don't have to call me darlin', darlin'
You never even called me, well I wondered why you don't call me?
Why don't you ever call me by my name?

Carter was ecstatic. The crying stopped. We survived the trip. Thank you, David Allen Coe, and my apologies to good moms everywhere.