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On The Road Again

Traveling with young children is exciting, although not in the ways you might expect. On family vacation in San Francisco last weekend, we spent most of our time investigating souvenir shops with Emma (almost age 3), and keeping an eye peeled for diaper change locations for Stella (2 months).

Emma's favorite was the Hello Kitty store, with tacky plastic trinkets of every sort, all bearing the likeness of an immensely popular Japanese cartoon kitten face. This stuff was beyond cute; it was so achingly and cloyingly sweet that it made the Teletubbies seem like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Fortunately, Emma is a pretty sensible girl, and settled for a juice mug.

Likewise, we were having good luck with Stella, whose intimate sanitation needs had been mostly confined to the hotel room. Feeling smug and in control, we went out for dinner.

The meal went smoothly, and it seemed we might finish without incident. Then, as we waited for the check, Stella demonstrated Homedaddy's Law #19, which states that the loudness of an infant's bodily function is always in inverse proportion to the ambient noise level in the restaurant. The quieter the restaurant, the louder the ð function. As it happened, it was a rather quiet establishment, and we turned quite a few heads. It's an unusual sound: If you didn't know better, you might think you were hearing milk being steamed for a cappuccino, or perhaps you might wonder if the restaurant was built on top of an active geothermal mud pit.

Badly rattled, we scrambled to gather up our metric ton of child supplies under the withering glare of the other diners. Changing the diaper right there in the restaurant was out of the question; we had caused enough trouble already. We decided to make a run for the hotel, eight blocks away, but Stella fell apart almost immediately. Unable to bear her plaintive screams a moment longer, we ducked into a laundromat to execute an emergency field maneuver.

Although modern disposable diapers are remarkably engineered, they are still no match for Mother Nature when she has an axe to grind. This was no ordinary diaper change. Our little travel kit, with its little rubber pad and slim box of wipes was pathetically insufficient; we needed a car wash. Bystanders rubbernecked as we worked furiously over Stella, calling out orders like the cast of ER: "More wipes ð let's have a trash can over here ð get a clean onesie standing by ð OK let's turn her over, on my count, ONE, TWO ... THREE!"

We made it back to the hotel room without further incident. As we collapsed into bed, we made a horrible discovery: Amid the ruckus, we had left Emma's Hello Kitty juice mug at the restaurant. A brief struggle ensued; blame was placed. Promises to obtain a replacement the next day were unsatisfactory. I offered to go to the airport and grab a nonstop to Tokyo to buy a new mug directly from the distributor, but no one took me seriously.

Eventually, fatigue had its way with everyone, and by morning's first light we were all none the worse for the wear and tear. Stella was her usual cheerful self, and Emma didn't seem to care that much about returning to the trinket shop.

We swung by to pick up a replacement, just to play it safe. I didn't think I could handle any more excitement.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.