Before a trip...

At our house, asking a child to do a chore somehow stimulates their bladder.

"I...have to go potty first!" they'll say.

And then I'll say something like, "Well, good thing I ask you to help out around the house, otherwise you'd never remember to go potty!"

*****

This is like that but it's like "good thing we send these kids on trips, otherwise we'd never take care of them."

I jest, of course...but this morning as we took Benjamin off to the doctor to finally fish a splinter out of his finger (that he got at YM camp the first week of June, wouldn't let me pull out, and assured me it would work its way out on its own...only to come to me the other day with a swollen, pussy finger...as if I'm the one who should have been keeping track of it all summer) so that it could be healing instead of festering while he's on his trip, I couldn't help laugh. 

We've taken Miriam to the urgent care twice before a big trip—once for a broken arm and once for an illness. 

It's not precisely that we plan these things, but it might seem like we only take them to urgent care immediately before sending them on a trip.

Here's Benjamin getting ready for exploratory...digging about:

They fished a little black thing out of his finger so he should finally feel some relief.

Now he and Andrew are on their way to Target to do a little pre-trip shopping because this morning before Benjamin's appointment he announced that he had finished packing for his trip.

"Did you pack underwear?" I asked. 

"Yes," he said. "I have underwear on..."

To be fair, this is a big thing for him. He went to swim tryouts yesterday and then went to bed and woke up in his jammers...so, like, the fact that he finally changed into underwear was big. But his response didn't really fill me with confidence so I stared him down.

"...and I packed my other pair," he finished.

"Excuse me?" I said. "What do you mean you packed your 'other pair'? You're going to need more than one change of underwear for a week."

"I couldn't find any others."

"Didn't you just do laundry?"

"Yeah. There wasn't any underwear in it."

"How?" I asked, then said, "Don't answer that. Just, like, surely you have more than two pairs of underwear."

"I don't know where any are," he said. 

We looked. He is quizzically low on underwear. 

So we'll fix that before he leaves on his trip as well!