apparently others don't swig pee...

My family took lots of road trips when I was a girl. I have 9 siblings so traveling by plane was not an option, but our vacations were always "eventful". Nowadays, my parents would be arrested for packing 10 kids in one car, but back then, it wasn't a big deal. We never had car seats or buckled up. My mom would nurse the baby in the passenger's seat and while a toddler sat at her feet. The rest of us would sit on laps, make beds in the trunk, and one lucky person got to sit on the cooler in between my parents. This was the way to vacation cheap! What made the trips REALLY exciting is when the car would break down in the middle of nowhere! I have a few memories of being inside a mechanic shop on a hot summer day, anxiously waiting for our car to get fixed so we could get back on the road. A few times, we were lucky enough to stay in a hotel overnight because the mechanic took more than one day to fix our car.. talk about excitement! Looking back, I have no idea how my parents did what they did, but I am grateful to them for making life fun even though we didn't have a lot of money.

One of our favorite things to do on road trips was to stop at the gas station for a fountain drink. What seems funny about it now is that we would get ONE or TWO drinks for all of us to share.. We would discuss what drink to get and would often mix several flavors to accommodate those who couldn't agree. Once we were on the road, we would pass the drink back and forth between everybody in the car. Germs existed, but we were okay because this was FAMILY Germs.

With so many kids traveling, making bathroom stops was just not possible. If they HAD to, my parents would pull over at a restroom, but if it was a boy and it wasn't #2, they would have to pee in a bottle. One of my brothers (whom we will not name because he gets embarrassed easily :) seemed to have to go to the bathroom every 10 minutes... so he frequently found something else to pee in. Sometimes this included the empty Big Gulp cup.

While on a road trip (when I was about 10-ish) I asked for someone to pass me the soda-- and as I took a big swig, I realized that the drink tasted very unfamiliar. It was warm, salty, and disgusting. I knew right away that instead of the drink, I was given the discard cup. That's right, I had just swallowed urine. The real drink was quickly passed to me and I believe I swallowed it all in one breath, trying to rinse my mouth. After about ten minutes, I was over it... because that's what you do when you're ten, right?

During our wedding luncheon, our families gave Aaron and I gifts as each of our siblings told stories about us growing up. It was fun to stroll down memory lane. Aaron recieved pillows from his sister followed by a story of him falling hard on his behind while bowling with his family. His mom gave him a Kermit the Frog memoir and told about the time he was found nursing his Kermit the Frog doll after he had seen his mom feed the new baby...

Each of my 9 siblings stood up and told stories about me... and Tim, my little brother with the small bladder, got up with a two liter of Mountain Dew and told the story of when he peed in a cup and I drank it out of a straw. Oh, sorry, Tim. I wasn't going to name names, but what's done is done. It really did happen and I lived to tell the story.