the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad car ride...

I was going to just throw this in with the post about my week with 4 kids, but thought this trip deserved a post of its very own, so here it is!
The kids and I traveled to my sister's for a week to help her out and watch the boys.  The trip to St. Louis started out a little rocky.  I've never driven that far with the kids by myself before so I was a little nervous.  I switched around my client so I could go there in the morning and hopefully get on the road early with the kids as to avoid some traffic and get to St. Louis before it got too dark.  Bob and Nancy arrived to watch the kids and I left to go to work...or I tried to go to work.  My car wouldn't start.  Awesome way to start my day.  I ended up taking their car to work.  I had planned on being done with work in a couple hours so that I could be on the road by 12 or 1.  Can you guess what happened?  I ended up working until 2:30, then it is a 30 minute drive home.  I knew I was going to be pushing it to get on the road before rush hour started, especially since after I got home Bob's dad ran out to get and install a new battery for my car.  We ended up not getting on the road until about 4:15.  I knew this was going to be trouble, but I didn't know how much until we started driving.  It took 2 hours to get to Joliet (which if you know where we live usually takes 1 hour at most).  When we finally got out of some of the traffic and construction I looked back at the kids and Bryce threw up.  Awesome.  So I pulled over, got him cleaned up as best as I could and got back on the road.  Then Brianna had to go to the bathroom, so I figured we might as well stop and get some dinner  even though we were only beginning the trip.  As we got our food at McDonalds I was carrying everything and trying to make sure the kids weren't getting into anything and 2 (full) glasses of pop fell off the tray and all over the floor.  I felt stupid and terrible and apologized 1000 times to the workers.  We finally settled down to eat and got back on the road.  Thankfully, after that the trip was very uneventful.  We got to my sisters about 11:30...7+ hours after we started out, for a trip that normally takes between 5 and 5 1/2 hours.  It was a long afternoon/night...but we made it.  And I am happy to report the return trip home took us 5 1/2 hours and we made NO stops the entire time, the kids were angels in the car (I had to keep checking to make sure they were actually my children!)