Every time my husband and I had a new baby, we hopped in the car to explore another part of the country. One of our first trips with an infant took us to the top of the Arch in St. Louis – a few years after it was completed. Subsequent babies had their toes dipped into the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. At least one saw Washington D.C. from the comfort of a little red wagon.
While my husband put the pedal to the metal, piled on the miles and conquered the road with as few stops as possible, I held the newest baby in the front seat where I could readily feed them, changing their diapers and entertaining them while the children in the back created their own play pen in the back.
We could do that back in the days before mandatory child safety seats and ‘click it or ticket’ campaigns strapped children down. Before the noise level hit ‘too rowdy’, I read chapter books to them – including the entire Narnia Series and Lord of the Ring Trilogy and prologue. Years later my son read the same books and was quite shocked to realize I had summarized lengthy descriptive passages.
Hey! I knew my audience – I needed to keep the entertainment lively.
Without mandatory seat belts, the boys claimed floor space, seat space or made private cubby holes in the middle of the luggage in the back – just as I had done when my parent packed up my brothers, sisters and I and headed from New York State across the country to Arizona where we posed on the edge of the Grand Canyon with a family of Navajo children. En route, my brothers, sisters and I tumbled around in the back of my parent’s station wagon entertaining ourselves until it was time to sleep. At least once my mother folded down all the seats, arranged our suitcases around the outside edges and handed us blankets and pillows. The big kids slept on the U-shaped luggage beds, the little kids got the middle. Safety never entered the picture – except to keep the driver from being distracted by tired, bored children.
That was then. This is now – and last weekend, I traveled, yet again with a baby – this time to visit my son in St. Louis with my daughter and her five-month-old son.
She could not hold him. He had to be strapped snugly into his bucket car seat and left there the entire time the car moved. He knows about that car seat and whimpers a “please don’t put me in there again” protest. His daddy distracted him with funny faces and sounds while his mother eased him into the shoulder harness. She doesn’t like it any better than him, especially on the long road trip when he had to stay there until we stopped.
“I miss holding him,” she said several hours into the drive.
She sat beside him, arranged a collection of hanging toys within his reach and kept a pacifier and his favorite stuffed animal handy. We played peek-a-boo, read him colorful baby books, shook rattles and rejoiced when he rubbed his eyes and settled into sleep. All that helped, but he had to eat, have his diaper changed and be heard when his impatient cries said, “I want to get out of this seat and move.”
We stopped – a couple times. At the burger joint, we laid him on top of a blanket on a table and distributed a few empty catsup cups, a couple straws and a plastic lid or two in front of him. He laughed, kicked and grabbed the fast food accessories and giggled at his freedom from the car seat.
Okay, we did not conquer the road in record time. We did eventually make it to my son’s house. The next day we ascended to the top of the Arch with yet another infant – and passed along the fine tradition of traveling to yet another – safer – generation.