Blue Blanket Adventure II

Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me first say something about our cross-country drive from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. It was, for the most part, uneventful. Eliza didn't make a peep the whole drive and we had an ongoing joke where we'd fake surprise at every stop, "What? We brought a baby??" The boys were pleasant and genuinely excited to see the trains, cows, and scenery (mostly cactus) along the way.

There was one bathroom stop that caused some ruckus though. I-10 east of El Paso runs through long stretches of desert, much of it only a few miles from the Rio Grande. With nowhere else to stop and little boys that couldn't wait, we pulled off at a ranch exit somewhere along that stretch. The exit apparently had been used as some sort of camp, and was littered with garbage and swarming with flies. While the kids did their business, a couple dozen buzzed into the car. We hurried the kids back inside and peeled back onto the freeway - swatting, flailing, and squealing as we tried to shoo the flies out the windows. After all was said and done we had quite a laugh.

We drove for several more hours, stopping once to eat dinner in El Paso and then driving on to Las Cruces, New Mexico for the night. When we got to the hotel and unloaded all our stuff, Isaac discovered his blue blanket missing. Any parent whose child loved a special-something will have an idea of the gravity of this.

We searched our bags. We searched the car. No blue blanket. The boys and I remembered it most recently in Nate's hands (um. . .not to point fingers or anything). He had confiscated it earlier in the day (sometime before dinner) after Isaac used it to whip Clayton. So after lots of tears and hugs, it was determined that blue blanket must've been by a front door and probably fell out of the car at IHOP in El Paso.

So Nate drove all the way back, scoured the parking lot and surrounding bushes, and notified the IHOP employees and commissioned a full-scale search of the restaurant. They found nothing. Not willing to give up, Nate drove over to Office Depot, where we stopped to buy a new memory card for my camera, thinking maybe it had fallen out there. No luck. He called me around midnight to ask me if I remembered how far back we stopped prior to El Paso. Maybe it fell out at the ranch exit. I couldn't remember. So Nate headed east into the night, pulling off at random ranch exits and searching them from the car and on foot for anything familiarly soft and blue. With such suspicious behavior from a midnight minivan driver along the border, it's no wonder he got pulled over. Nate had some explaining to do. But luckily after hearing about the missing blanket, the officer let him off with just a warning.

After finding the "fly" exit at last and thoroughly searching the surroundings, poor Nate drove all the way back to Las Cruces empty handed. Well, that's not quite true: he did have cactus barbs stuck in one of his hands. But no blue blankie.

At 3:00 AM I heard the door to our hotel room click and creak open. Nate somberly walked in and without a word . . . tossed me Isaac's blanket.

He'd decided to search the car one last time before coming to bed, and found it in the seat pocket in front of Isaac's third row seat. It has become so thin over the years that it hardly took up any space, stuffed deep into the pocket.

And so our trip began.

(Isaac with blue blankie - 2 days old)

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