Where NOT to go with twins

Oh dear. Just when I think we've got the whole travel thing worked out, we have another disaster.

Today we had planned to go up past Kernville to Shirley Meadows to look for snow. Although the East Coast is blizzarding, out here we're starting to think about spring. Not much time left for sledding. But we had a busy morning and it got too late for a long trip like that.

So we made a new plan. I've been trying to get Rocket Boy to buy some new pants, but he always says he doesn't need any. Then on Friday he had to make an emergency trip home from work because his pants split. So we decided to go to Kohl's for new ones. Unfortunately, Kohl's is in Palmdale, 90 miles away. To make the trip a little more twin-friendly, we decided to include a visit to the Cat House in Rosamond (otherwise known as the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound's Feline Conservation Center). We drove an hour to Mojave for lunch at Denny's, and then it was maybe 15 minutes more to the Cat House.

We arrived around 2:30 pm, parked in the dusty lot, and walked up to the entrance (that is, Rocket Boy and I walked, while the twins hopped, danced, and ran). You enter through the gift shop, well stocked with interesting cat items. After we paid our $24 ($7 adults, $5 kids), the woman at the counter told Baby A and Baby B the rules: (1) Don't run, (2) Don't yell, (3) Don't go on the grass, (4) Don't chase the peacocks. I thought about turning around and leaving right then, but it's hard to turn around and leave when you've just spent $24 and your children KNOW that they're about to enter a kind of zoo. We'd been talking and talking about the big cats we were going to see.

Anyway, you can probably write this next paragraph for me. We enter the zoo. Boos spot the grass, begin to run across it. We chase them: "Don't run! Don't go on the grass!" They spot a big, interesting rock on the grass and want to climb it. We say "No! Don't go on the grass! Come see the cats!" They start to yell and then to scream. A mountain lion that has been eating its dinner runs and hides. We say "No! Don't yell!" They run over the grass again. A park employee tries to help out by urging the kids to come and see some other cats. Reluctantly they go with her, but Baby B continues to yell at me about how he wants to go on the rock, and then starts kicking the fence around the cats' cage, hard. Everyone is staring at us and the cats are getting more and more agitated.

I give up, pick him up, and carry him out of the park, still screaming.

Above you can see the grass that we weren't allowed to walk on and just a corner of the rock they wanted to climb on. This is the only picture I took at the park. Things fell apart too quickly.

It took forever to calm them down enough to get in the car, and Baby B screamed pretty much all the rest of the way to Palmdale. He kept saying "I wanted to see more CATS!!!" It was horrible.

In Palmdale, Rocket Boy and Baby A shopped at Kohl's, while I stayed with Baby B, who was too freaked out to leave the car. A long long time later, RB and Baby A emerged from the store with one pair of pants that had cost $63. WTF??? I thought Kohl's was a discount store. "That's the last pair of pants I'm buying in California!" Rocket Boy declared. It had not been a good shopping experience.

We were back in Ridgecrest by 7 pm. Maybe by tomorrow I will have calmed down.

On the plus side, the experience reminded me why I am moving back to Boulder. There's a Kohl's six miles from our old house in Boulder. Six miles. Do you know how different today would have been if we had only needed to drive six miles to go shopping?