Bottleneck

 

Sydney and I had the rare occurrence of a completely free day today.  I had been needing a few things in the states for a while, and wasn't sure when I was going to be able to get down there with Sydney in school five mornings a week, so I decided late last night that Syd and I would jump in the car and head down to Bellingham this morning.

Before we left, we spent a few minutes whipping up a batch of dark chocolate bran muffins.  Sydney really loves to bake so much, I often hear her saying "I make great muffins" or "I'm a good cook" when she's eating something that she's made!  We had great fun this morning in the kitchen!

After all the fun baking, off we went to Bellingham.  The drive there was pretty straightforward except for the twenty minute potty break that we had to take just metres away from the border!  I am still getting used to this whole being in the car and having to go to the washroom business.  I often pack Sydney's little green potty around in the car with us so that we have a ready-made bathroom with us at a moment's notice and it sure came in handy today!

We made Target our first stop, stocked up on our usual staples there and got a few things for Sydney's loot bags for her birthday party as well.

Also got some t-shirts, jeggings and pants for Sydney's basket of extra clothes at school.  Couldn't resist when they were four pieces for $20!

Sydney saw these Hello Kitty shoes and squealed with delight!  I thought they were so cute and we just had to have them!  They are adorable on her!

Later today, when we had reached home, I quickly stashed all of our Target bags in my office upstairs and later that evening while we were getting ready for bed, I found Sydney had unpacked everything and lined it all up on the carpet!  She was so enjoying checking out everything that we'd bought!

After a quick stop at Bath and Body Works so that Syd could pick up her boatload of hand sanitizer and soap, we headed to the food fair for lunch.

We love Sbarro there, they make the most delicious pizzas!  We happily sat having lunch and enjoying our pizza.

It was about here that our day went a bit sideways.  I should have just packed Sydney up right then and headed for Trader Joe's like we'd planned so that we could get home before the rush of the Friday afternoon border lineups and Massey Tunnel backup on the way back into Vancouver.  But it was Friday, I was feeling mellow, and Syd was having so much fun checking out the stores at the mall, that we stayed for a extra hour and a half just looking around.

Then, of course, we had to drive with our hair on fire to Trader Joe's, fly around the store to get what we needed, visit the potty, stop at Panda Express to pick up dinner and head for the border.  Three times on the way driving to the border Sydney told me she had to go to the bathroom, three times we pulled over and she sat on her little potty, three times she cried wolf.

I have to say that the rest stops in the states are awesome though, so clean and tucked away in the trees.  I enjoyed the view while Sydney kicked me out of the car while she sat on her potty in the backseat, telling me that she needed some privacy.  By the third time I'd fallen for this trick, I was feeling more than a little irritated, threw a pull-up on her in case she really wasn't fooling later, and told her that under no circumstances were we stopping again until we got home and that was final!

By the time we finally got to the border, the lines were definitely longer than we had hoped, but we still made it over in about a half hour and were so glad to be headed home.  Then we hit the traffic heading into the Massey Tunnel after the counter lane had already gone in leaving the city.  Five lanes of traffic were bottlenecking and merging into one extremely slow moving lane through the tunnel and it took us almost two hours of inching along to finally make it to the other side of the tunnel!  This was my view for two hours this afternoon, standstill traffic with irritated drivers in the twenty five degree heat:

I was praying that Sydney would have mercy on me and decide to have a little nap in her carseat during this brutal drive, but no luck!  She whined and cried and told me she had to go to the bathroom and could I please let her out of her carseat a million times.  I literally wanted to cry.  I was stuck in the middle of five lanes of traffic with nowhere to pull over, was thinking that she probably legitimately had to go to the bathroom by now, and had little to no food to feed her and it was getting close to dinner time.

I finally cracked open the Panda Express takeout, in desperation, and let her eat some fried rice which calmed her down for a moment but I was pretty sure that I was going to lose my mind at some point during that two hour window.   Mental note for next time:  don't head to the states on a Friday, and if you're going to be heading back from the states into the city anytime between 3:00 and 6:00, stay in Bellingham for dinner and come home late and save yourself the headache!

I was never so glad to get home in all my life!  What an adventure we had!  It was a fun time shopping, nevertheless, and we did get everything we went for and then some, so in the end it was a successful, albeit exhausting, day!

Plus I had two hours to teach Sydney the meaning of the word 'bottleneck' while we were stuck in traffic!  Happy Friday!