The Drive Home and Time with the Sprungers

Originally we planned to drive home to Indiana first thing Saturday morning (as of Wednesday it was supposed to be good weather). However, Friday afternoon about 3pm, I (Mark) was on a conference call with some people at corporate in Natick, MA hearing about how bad their weather was and that they expected another storm front in two days... which made me start to wonder when that '2nd' storm front was going through our neck of the woods. So I checked the weather only to find out that it was now supposed to dump 5-7 inches of snow starting in the Twin Cities clear through Chicago. Based on the winter weather advisories and typicall drive time, we'd be right on the front of the storm for the entire 11 hour drive (or potentially 20 hr in this case). So we called an audible, gave Lana a call to start packing, and decided to leave as soon as possible.

I got home from work about 5pm and we managed to get packed for a 2 week trip for Adde, both of us, Titus, plus Christmas presents, quickly eat and feed Adde, then quickly clean the house (one of Lana's interesting must-do quirks before we ever leave for an extended period) and still be on the road by 6pm while only forgetting 2 minor items. Lana did an amazing job getting everything around.

We definitely made the right call to drive through the night as roads were completely clear and there was little to no traffic. Adde slept almost the entire trip and only needed to eat once around 9:30. She only had one incident where she got riled up, as she started fussing a little and Mommy thought she was cold since her cheeks were chilly. We added more layers and turned up the heat a bit. Adde continually escalated until we pulled off to calm her down. When we pulled her out of her car seat the back side of her was drenched in sweat (while still having chilly cheeks).... so turns out she was fired up about being too hot and she let us know that we had made it worse. Once that problem was quickly corrected, she stayed asleep the rest of the trip.

We arrived home with about 11 hours of drive time. Promptly handed Adde (now wide awake at 7am) to Mimi and Grandpa Sprunger for child care duties, and headed directly to bed to catch up on some sleep.