The Freeway Drive From Hell

This image was taken from raredelights.com.

When we first moved to Diamond Bar, I thought I'd be commuting back to Brentwood for work and going to Santa Monica for pediatrician appointments throughout the week and the farmers market on Sundays. I've lived in the LA area for a while now and I'm no stranger to traffic. But I just didn't think about it when we decided to move so far east. Well, not just the traffic, but the distance. Diamond Bar is a good 30 miles from Santa Monica. I may have been in denial about the many realities of moving to the suburbs as a city dweller. I just didn't think that going back and forth from Diamond Bar to the westside would be a big deal. I was so wrong!

Since moving and having the baby, I quit my job in Brentwood, found a new pediatrician for the baby in San Dimas and have not once been to the Santa Monica farmers market on Sunday. But we have subjected our daughter to that heinous drive a few times anyway. The trek home from the hospital when she was 2 days old took about 3 hours thanks to traffic. Thankfully, she slept through that entire ordeal! We took her back to Santa Monica to see the pediatrician when she was 4 days old, and that was another 3 hour trip back to Diamond Bar. Dad was with me both of those times, and baby girl slept the entire time, roundtrip, both times.

When she was about 6 weeks old, it was time for me to see the OBGYN. So off to Santa Monica we went, just the two of us. The trip there was easy and the appointment was smooth. The trip back was absolutely nightmarish! I kid you not, prior to this particular incident I had told people that my biggest fear was getting stuck in traffic with the baby. What if we were stuck in the far left lane and dead stopped and she started screaming and I couldn't pull over to get to her? I now know.

And I think because the drive was "stop and go," baby girl did not sleep. She screamed. And screamed. And cried. Her face turned red and her throat became hoarse while we slowly crept along the 10 freeway past downtown LA. I had goosebumps, I was sweating, the back of my neck felt like it was lifting off my bones... At times I cried with her. What saved me from a complete melt down was a few stretches of uninterrupted driving. Even if we were only going 35mph on the freeway, the movement helped settle the baby. A few times she even fell back to sleep.

The worst part was when I decided to jump on the 7-10 north from the 60, to get to I-10 and avoid an accident on the 60. According to Google maps at that very moment it was the fastest way home. Of course once I was on the 7-10 making headway, another accident occurred right where the 7-10 and 10 meet. So we were completely stopped and baby girl woke up. She started screaming and making sounds I'd never heard her make before. Her mouth was open so wide it was almost cartoonish, like her uvula was vibrating from the sound. She turned red and then started to turn a sort of purple. I just started repeating "I am so sorry, I am so sorry!" aloud, over and over again. Of course I was all the way over in the left lane and couldn't see any decent looking exits immediately ahead.

I was finally able to find us some solace in the parking lot of the Monterrey Park Golf Club... and I am sorry to the owners of this establishment for everything that happened next. I pulled baby girl out of her car seat and cuddled her until she settled down a little bit. We then executed a sloppy diaper change in the back seat of my Toyota Corolla, which is not easy to do with the Graco SnugRide Click Connect 40 car seat base permanently fixed in the middle seat. A costume change was in order, so we took care of that and cleaned her up.

I double checked the traffic situation on my phone and saw that it was going to take at least another 2 hours to get home from there. I decided we had to just get back on the road and keep making slow progress, and I'd stop another random place if I had to soothe her again. Of course it was then that I realized I had to pee something fierce. I had been drinking a lot of coffee that day and a ton of water, and it was the kind of pee I could not hold. I looked around and the dining room looked closed, the pro shop looked closed and there were very few cars in the parking lot. I didn't want to deal with putting baby girl in her stroller to go knock on doors and find a bathroom. So... I  decided it was time to be resourceful. I took an empty Starbucks Grande cup and squatted over it in the front passenger seat of the car. I filled the cup with pee and dumped it out, then filled the cup again. I couldn't help but laugh as I narrated the whole incident to my daughter, who was strapped into her seat in the middle of the back row.

So we were finally ready to get back on the road and on our way home, like a herd of turtles. It was then I realized that I had peed all over the passenger seat and my purse. I couldn't not smell my own pee as the car crawled home along the crowded freeways, and the baby screamed. I have yet to clean the front passenger seat of my car, and I don't think I'll throw the purse away. I'm debating how I'm going to clean it, or not clean it. It's been so long at this point...