🚉 👶🏽👶🏽🧳😩
The hellish trip I took this past weekend, that will haunt me forever.
This past Thursday morning, at 4:30am, I packed up an Uber with a large stroller, a comically-oversized suitcase, 3 backpacks, and two sleepy toddlers. I started the trek to Great Falls, VA, to visit my parents. Our journey would lead us through Penn Station, onto an Acela train, into Union Station (DC), and a 45-minute bumper-to-bumper traffic-plagued final drive to their suburban home (the same I was raised in).
I say this with tremendous humility — I was not at all prepared.
To say that it was chaos is a total understatement. It’s Tuesday morning, and after two full days of recovery, I still feel more hungover than I did waking up in Key West in 2002 after our first night of Spring Break. I feel like a truck hit me at 70 mph, and left me for dead on the side of a gravel road, and, as I try to ignore the pain, a stray dog walks up to pee on my beaten body.
Was that a good enough visual for you? Too much?
Here are the things I learned on the trip:
Treats (chips, candy, etc.) are great tools to deploy at home (or playground) when trying to get your kids through a tantrum. That said, they are the WORST THING HUMANLY POSSIBLE to rely on during a 4-hour train ride.
The food car has many items on their menu that sound fantastic to kids (blueberry muffins! vanilla yogurt! fruit medley!) but are prepared/packaged in a way that makes them inedible by the same kids who begged for everything on the menu.
Train bathrooms are a cesspool and a hands-on science experiment for a 2yo. Said another way… Coco touched EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.
The train car’s ceiling above your seats is just low enough to hit your hysterically sobbing toddler’s head whenever you sit down or stand up while holding her. Doing so makes everyone on the train look at you like you’re an abusive and incompetent father who might be executing a “Not Without my Daughter”-style international heist of my children (hence my wife not being there). Yes, I pulled an obscure 90’s movie reference out. But, seriously, their eyes burned a hole through me and into my soul.
I am WAY TOO OLD to join my kids at a trampoline park and came 🤏🏾 this close to breaking my own neck.
If you learn, on your own first solo train ride with kids, what I did in bullet #1, then don’t double down by bringing literally twice as many of the exact same treats on the return train ride, hoping for a different result. It. Ends. Badly.
It is ok to cry. In public, private, or anywhere else. Especially when dragging a suitcase, 2 car seats, a packed stroller, two exhausted toddlers, and three backpacks, by yourself, from Penn Station to Lincoln Square via the subway.
No, nobody will help you while you’re crying. And, the same people staring at you on the train will somehow replicate themselves like Agent Smith from The Matrix, showing up at every turn, continuing the hours-long, one-sided staring contest.
When she unexpectedly shows up to help you for the last two blocks, your wife will look like an angel sent down from the heavens. You will tell yourself, “I will follow this person forever.”
That’s all I’ve got this week. I can’t turn my head to the left because of a sprain caused by carrying a collective 100lb suitcase/car seat monster that resembled a junkyard version of Voltron. My forearms are burning from pushing a stroller one-handed while also dragging said robotic monstrosity. I might still be crying while I type these last words.
See you next week. Be good to each other,
Rehan