813 mile car trip
I don’t know when car trips with Jackson first began turning into huge musical deliberations. Probably about the time I lost Caleb as my opposing radio station debater. Jackson doesn’t have 50% say when it comes to music choice like Caleb did, not yet anyway. That doesn’t stop him from adamantly arguing for his pick.
“What are we going to listen to,” he says.
“Um… Keith Urban, I think.”
“How about something else,” he suggests. “Like the Car Trip song?”
“Um… how about you get to listen to your music after we pass Auburn?”
“That’s too far,” he insists. “How about two songs are yours, then two songs are mine?”
“Um… I guess that sounds fair.”
He has impeccable negotiating skills for a four-year-old.
The “Car Trip” song is his most requested. Here are the lyrics:
813 Mile Car Trip
Eight hundred and thirteen mile car tripEight hundred and thirteen mile car tripFour hundred and seventeen miles to goThree thousand treesFourteen hundred buildingsOne spilt cup of orange juiceNineteen pit stopsOne hundred and fifteen pick-up trucksEight hundred and thirteen mile car trip-They Might Be Giants
So as I’m listening to this song for the eleventh twelfth twentieth time and nearing the last stretch of highway that takes us home, I begin to realize that 19 pit stops during an 813 mile car trip means about 1 pit stop every 42.7 miles. And since our car trip today was only 145 miles, if my math is correct, we should only have made 3 pit stops. But since Jackson has a very small bladder and we actually made 4, I will (for however long it is stuck in my head) be singing the song with my modified lyrics: “twenty-two pit stops!”
Hopefully that one little line will be enough to remind me why I don’t go on 813 mile car trips.
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