Here’s the thing that we discovered yesterday: when you decide to fly half-way across the country with three small children, just so that you can turn around and drive back in the other direction, you need to have a plan.

Our plan is: schedule travel around cycles of exhaustion, which is to say, schedule travel to occur immediately after the children have worked off all of their excess energy, such that they’re always near collapse by the time they’re loaded in the vehicle. And if that means blasting ABBA at 9 o’clock in the morning so that they can choreograph, practice, and perform a Live! Preschooler! 1970’s Dance Revue!, so be it.

And if the music box craps out, just pray that the car seat straps hold.

(More updates will be posted at the I’m A Mom Blogger On A Road Trip, Get Me Out Of Here website and at Their Bad Mother and pretty much everywhere else that I write. And if I go radio silent anywhere for more than 48 hours, it means that the ABBA didn’t work and the children have taken over, so. Maybe send help.)

(Have to close comments, because I just won’t be able to read them. Comments are open and being moderated at the Road Trip site, however, so if you have helpful tips for travelling with rabid badgers and perhaps music for the taming thereof, please do weigh in.)