How to survive a day trip:

The following are instructions for anyone insane enough to take six small children to an air show, let alone out in public.

1. Make sure all children are squished on the ride so that eye gouging, hitting, and kicking are easily facilitated.

2. Turn on radio to attempt to drown out the noise, only to discover that the louder the radio, the louder the children.

3. When you realize that the bus ride from the parking lot to the air show is the most exciting part for the almost two year old, you should probably save yourself some trouble and just go home.

4. Continue to tell the oldest children that they are NOT allowed to sit in the stroller or hang onto it.

5. Attempt to keep children from shoving each other over, walking on the backs of each others shoes and force them to share their shaved ice. Parents are SOOOO mean!

6. Stand in really long lines to see cool planes, but make sure all children are as miserable as possible. In other words, make sure children are starving to death, dehydrated and falling asleep. It makes the experience more, well, more something.

7. While going through said cool planes, make sure to repeat the following phrase ad naseum, "Don't touch stuff." Repeat as necessary, interspersing it with, "Get up off the floor".

8. When offered a free drink, take it even though it is not caffeine free. Anything to stop the whining. But then make sure not to get upset when the children decide to wear their drink down their fronts. Just smile and nod.

9. Take exhausted parents out for dinner, but make sure the infant is as hungry as possible. After feeding infant, pinch her a few times so that she cries ALL the way through dinner, making the feeding of the cranky parental units as difficult as humanly possible.

10. Instruct four year old on how to throw the most unreasonable tantrum about which cookie she gets so that you exit the restaurant with as much commotion as possible.

11. Finally, return home, swearing the whole way that you will NEVER do anything like that again. Then within five minutes of arrival, make sure the four year old trips, smashes her face into the banister and needs stitches. It rounds out the day nicely.


I'd like to say we had fun at the air show yesterday, but I'm thinking that's definitely the wrong word to use. So I'll merely say, we went to the air show yesterday.