Eureka!  The Johnson Zoo has finally arrived in California.  After driving through the night to get to Southern California, I had anticipated on sleeping in.  What a joke!  The baby had other plans.  At six o’clock, a little person sat up in bed next to me.

“Mama.”  I did what any good mom would do.  I rolled over.  “Mama.  Mama.  Maaaaamaaaaa.”  Since Nate’s ear surgery we have picked up a handful of words but none of them seem to bring him the joy of this one.  “Mama.”  The covers come over my head.  God isn’t even awake yet and my one-year-old wants to play.  “Maaaaaamaaaaaa!”  Why did we want him to talk?  Signing is so wonderfully quiet and easy to ignore.

I didn’t get any further in my morning ponderings because at this point my little Frog Prince decided he didn’t like being ignored.  One minute I was thinking about the joys of signing and the next minute a soggy diaper was sitting on my head.  “Yee-haw!”  Bounce.  Bounce.  Bounce.  As a mom, I have come to accept many of the highlights that come with my position: changing wet sheets, catching regurgitated hot dog in the middle of a restaurant, and even having diaper overflow on my best dress.  There is a reason children don’t come with an instruction manual.  Smart people would eBay the manual, read the fine print, and second think parenthood!  The perptuation of the human race would come to a complete hault and there would be no one left to read my Chronicles.  Someone got smart, deleted the manual file, and now unsuspecting parents get to experience the joys of children.  Bounce, bounce, squish.  There is something inherently repulsive to waking up to a cold, wet diaper sitting on your head.  Sheet or no sheet, it doesn’t matter.  It is icky.  Extra icky! 

After reflexively launching my baby off the bed and then consoling him back from hysterics, I was ready to start my day.  Ready really isn’t the word.  I extracted my exhausted self from my comfortable cocoon and contemplated prying my eyes open.  It was our first day in long awaited California.  We had traveled some 4,000 miles to get here, endured unspeakable hardships, hours of Vegitales sing alongs, but we had finally arrived.  I can totally attest to the sheer joy the pioneers must have felt when their wagon wheel broke from the enth time and their wives finally said they could just stop and build their cabin there.

My original plan, like most my others, didn’t exactly come to fruition.  Everyone we know and love lives in good old California so visiting grandparents, aunties, and cousins was at the top of my to do list.  I’m not sure why I bother planning.  The gods were against us today.  The first order of business was cleaning out the car we had lived in for a month so we could take it to the dealer.  I am sure there is some mathematical equation to determine the amount of Cheetos crumbs four kids can generate over a four week period.  It is a lot.  Probably close to infinity squared.  After rediscovering long lost shoes, reorganizing travel game bags, and raking an unholy amount of “stuff” out of the bottom of my car, we were off to take the ZooMobile to the spa where it could get it’s wheels polished and it’s engine massaged and hopefully return home to me with all cylinders working. 

There is something to be said about stereotypes. While they are certainly not applicable to everyone in a category, time has taught me that they usually originate somewhere.  Being a proud West Virginian, I can laugh right along with the red neck jokes because I know a few people who give them truth.  Like wise, the service dealer we dealt with gave power to the beach stereotype.  Pretty and clueless.  I hope she finds a rich husband soon who can support them so she can get out of the service writing industry quickly.  “It’s doing what? The spark plug is arcing?  I think that might be bad.”  You think.  I’m not coming here to drop a small fortune into your itty bitty suntanned lap because I thought that clunking sound was the sign of a healthy, happy engine!!!!

Have I mentioned that I get a little sarcastic when I am exhausted and starving?  Papa Chuck graciously took us out to brunch.  Instead of feeling better, I began to feel worse.  I had apparently ordered cactus fries.  The effort of swallowing them brought tears to my eyes and my delicious looking burger was simply inedible.  Bekah, who had spent the last two weeks begging for Mac ‘N Cheese, now sat there pushing it around her plate.  The baby eats anything he can fit into his mouth and his appetite certainly wasn’t affected this morning but you couldn’t see his bright and shining face for all the boogers.  As the waitress carried away my untouched plate I decided our beach play date was going to have to wait until after a quick trip to the doctors.

Did I say quick?  I meant slow.  Agonizingly S-L-O-W.  Nothing like sitting in the E.R. for 3½ hours with sick kids when you could be chasing waves at the beach your first day in California. It wasn’t just that I had to sit there.  I had to keep them sitting there while I filled out five separate telephone books worth of confidential health history.  We all live at the same house with the same phone number.  The kids have all the same contact info.  Could we not use the pretty little copier in the back to save the sick mom an hour of busy work?  Nope.  Everyone got to have their own piece of paper with a million questions all hand filled out by yours truely.  Does it really matter that I stubbed my toe when I was five or that my great-great-great grandfather twice removed and then glued back on again lost a nail?  Fix my throat so we can go to the beach!

When someone finally felt the whim to take us back into the mysterious beyond, I was informed that we couldn’t all be in the same room.  My family is currently composed of one mommy and four kids.  Hmmmm, let’s think about this for a minute.  I asked the nurse who she would like me to leave unsupervised, the babies or the bash brothers.  Remarkably, an exception was made to their policy and a room was found that fit all of us.  It didn’t long for the nurse to get her revenge.  Since we were all being seen, she checked all of our vitals.  Then, we all got to step out into the world’s most populated hall and step on the scale.  Drew jumped right on and proudly announced that he weighed 69 pounds.  Kaleb pushed him aside and determined that he weighed 68.8 pounds which was just as good as Drew.  In fact, it was even better because he is two years younger and just think how much Moose would weigh when he was eight.  While they were arguing over this detail, Bek stepped up.  She was officially a big girl now weighing in at 32 pounds.  She had finally broken the 30 pound mark, an important stepping stone in the Johnson Zoo, so we all did the happy dance with her in the hall.  Now that we had the attention of everyone in the building, Nate jumped on.  There must be a trick to keeping a baby still on the scale but we didn’t know it and neither did the nurse.  I was a bad mom and pulled out a secret lollipop which mysteriously found its way into Nate’s mouth.  I have never put soda into a bottle but I have been guilty of using lollipops to bribe children into compliancy. M&M's are equally effective but I ate all those in the waiting room.  In the moment of his delighted surprise, Nate weighed in at 30.6 pounds which also qualified him as a big kid.  A really big kid.  A second happy dance ensued. 

Now it was my favorite part of a doctor’s visit.  Stick me.  Measure my belly.  Why, oh why, must we always be weighed at the doctors?  There is something about a scale that makes me feel like a piece of meat.  I quickly stepped on.  A large piece of meat.  The numbers flashed and I stepped off.  Not too horribly bad.  I had actually lost a few pounds of vacation!  “Wow, Mom. That is a HUGE number.”  Thanks so much.  “You must be as big as dad!”  Excuse me?  “You weigh a TON!”  You are never getting a Happy Meal again.  “You are a VERY big girl, Mommy!”  If we hadn’t had the entire building’s attention before, we did now.  Most people were nice enough to try to conceal their snicker.  The nurse laughed out loud.  Thanks.  Out of the mouths of babes.  Can we please take Big Bertha and her sick herd back to their room?!?!

Thankfully, the doctor was a wonderful woman who realized that the Johnson destruction crew was waiting in a room filled with very intriguing, very expensive toys.  She came right in and began inspecting us.  Three fevers over a hundred.  Five sets of swollen glands.  Five bright red throats complete with ***** white streaks.  One yaking Moose.  The not-so-tickly throat tickle cinched it.  We had five severe cases of strep throat.  Welcome to California!

Being outrageously contagious for the next 24 hours, we cancelled our beach play date, which we were already late for, and proceeded onto infecting everyone at the pharmacy.  Apparently, it takes a lot of medicine to treat five cases of step.  So much medicine, in fact, that a single pharmacy couldn’t fill our prescriptions.  Neither could the next three places the pharmacist called.  She said she could fill half the prescriptions today and I could come back tomorrow for the other half.  Make me pick which kids start feeling better now, I think not.  What is behind Door #2?  We ended up splitting the prescription between two pharmacies.  Twice the wait, twice the paper work, and twice the people to infect.  When I ran in to pick up our precious drugs, I was disappointed to learn it wasn’t ready.  The doctor had prescribed a brand name medicine that had no generic equivalent, therefore the regular co-pay didn’t apply.  Did I still want the medicine?  Let see…  I am dying.  I can’t see any of my family I just drove 4,000 miles to visit because we are highly contagious.  I just spent four very long hours in the E.R.  You know that I went to two different pharmacies so that I could treat all my children today.  Nah, I don’t want that medicine.  I enjoy feeling like this!!!  It took the wonderful lady forty minutes to mix the medicine and then call it through the insurance.  We got to repeat the entire thing at the second pharmacy.  If you take my cell number when we drop off our prescriptions, why don't you call it if you have a question about whether or not to fill it?  Two long hours later we finally had our drugs. 

Now feeling absolutely horrible and more than a little frustrated, a good dose of ice cream was in order.  Life lesson #56: Cookie dough may fix everything but when the thought of hard chocolate chips isn't pleasant, ice cream makes a close second.  We ordered the biggest sundae they had.  As we sat around inhaling our soft, cold dinner when Bekah determined she liked California.  “Mommy never lets us have ice cream for dinner back home.” 

It might sound funny once we got the drugs in our system, it wasn’t such a bad first day.  The kids were very disappointed about having to cancel our beach play date but they recovered quickly when the doctor said they could swim in Papa’s pool.  She rationalized it would help their fevers and wearing them out would do me some good too!  After our healthy dinner, we spent a couple kickback hours laughing and relaxing by the pool.  The boys got to show off their new swimming skills and Bek was enamored by a pair of pink flippers she found in the pool shed.  Nate was in little boy heaven with all of his cousin’s trucks to play with.  Even poor Rusty got in on the action when he wandered into the middle of a full fledged water gun battle. 

Baths were the last order of business.  My Zoo crew always comes running when they hear bath water so they were very excited to learn that Papa has a Jacuzzi tub.  Bathing suits were quickly shed as little naked people scrambled into the world’s biggest tub.  We discovered a little bubble bath goes a LONG way when jets are involved!  The kids had a blast giving each other bubble beards and crowns.  Somewhere along the line they even got clean.  I admit to being absolutely amazed at the ring of dirt left at the bottom of the tub when everyone finally decided they were waterlogged.  Who would have thought that that much dirt could have been left on them after three hours of pool play?!?! 

We all wound down with our Disney trading pins.  Tomorrow’s trip to Disneyland has been postponed.  It wouldn’t do to make Mickey sick!  Tears were shed until I figured out that our 24-hour cantagious period would be over in more than enough time to do Disney Walk in the evening.  It wasn’t Disney proper but the kids love walking through the stores and dancing along with the live entertainment.  Best of all, there is pin trading.  The kids scampered to get their pin bags and began sorting and trading among themselves.  It was fun to see everyone’s collections again and hear of their pin aspirations.  Disney Walk doesn’t have the same number of pin traders as the theme parks so the kids decided to leave their pin bags at home and take only their lanyard necklaces, which of course had to be loaded with their tradable pins.  Another hour of activity followed and everyone was finally ready to call it a night. 

Of all our traveling adventures, the hardest aspects of the trip to this point has been enduring the mundane.  Nothing like spending two hours in a laundry mat with four kids to make you appreciate the convenience of your washing machine.  Beaking down on the freeway is rough but you know it will pass.  Folding laundry is compounded by the knowledge that you will be doing this again next week.  This is most true when trying to shower with four little rugrats.  I don’t care how big they say their water heater is, by the time four little bodies are scrubbed clean, four heads have been shampooed, and four sets of toes have been rediscovered for all the dirt, there is no hot water left for you.  Shaving becomes a luxury you can’t afford as the baby picks someone else’s hair out of the drain while your daughter plays peek-a-boo with the stranger in the next shower stall.  After all my little people were tucked snug into bed, I snuck out and enjoyed the longest, hottest shower in the world.  I got to shampoo my hair without anyone clamouring for more water.  I got to shave both my legs.  I even got to use a dry towel when I was done.  My shower did wonders for my body, my smell, and my temperment.

It certainly wasn’t the day I had planned but it wasn’t a bad one either.  My car should return from the “spa” ready for an uneventful return trip home.  The kids and I are back on the road to health.  Drew was very impressed that he was able to get his in a pill form which eliminated the normal medicinal drama we enjoy when he gets sick.  Bek got to feast on ice cream for dinner and then we all swam ourselves silly.  After taking the world’s bubbliest bubble bath, we spent the evening snuggled up reminiscing over our trip up to this point and looking forward to adventures yet to come.  Best yet, I got to shave both my legs!  The plans of mice and men!  The beach will be there tomorrow…