Driving gets a whole lot more interesting with a baby on board…
Many of you have probably seen the McDonald’s commercial where a father trying to order a coffee and breakfast sandwich at a McDonald’s keeps circling through the drive-thru, over and over. If he stops he knows his kid is going to wake up. The McDonald’s staff goes above and beyond to help him to continue driving so his baby will keep sleeping and the father can actually get his food.
I want to throw a brick through my television every time I see that commercial.
I know 99.9% percent of parents probably have good laugh about the commercial, relating it to their own experiences of getting their crying baby to calm down by taking the kid out for a drive. Meanwhile, a little piece of me dies each time I watch it.
Let me explain: my daughter Ravneet, who is five months old now, HATES being in a moving vehicle. We noticed it first when we were returning from our trip to Seattle a couple of months ago. She had fallen asleep before we started driving and we got through the border this way, but as soon as we hit Highway 1, the whimpering started. Then it was light crying and by the time we were crossing Vancouver’s Port Mann Bridge, Ravneet had begun what I call her five alarm cry (goes something like this: waaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!).
Even though Baljeet (my wife) tried to placate her by shaking shaking rattles and singing to her, nothing seemed to work. We assumed she was hungry so we pulled over so Baljeet could feed her. She stopped crying but as soon we started driving, the crying started again. A few minutes later, when we got home, the crying stopped as soon as I pulled keys out of the ignition of the car in our garage.
This was just the beginning. It has got to the point where we dread going anywhere where the drive is longer than 20 minutes. My sister invited us for Christmas day dinner, and sure enough Ravneet cried the whole way there and the whole way back. What is usually a 35 minutes trip from Coquitam to South Vancouver took over an hour with all the stops we made to calm Ravneet down.
At Ravneet’s five-month checkup, I asked our family doctor what the problem could be. Our doctor mentioned it could be motion sickness, especially since Ravneet is fine almost immediately after she is out of the car. Also, the doctor said, if the crying occurs during night driving, it could be that Ravneet does not have enough to see in order to distract her from her motion sickness.
Having received some insight to the situation, we now stick to more day trips and stay close to home. Things have got better but every once in a while Ravneet likes to remind us how much she hates being in the car.
I still have people who have had children tell me about packing their kid up in the middle of the night and going for a drive until the kid fell asleep. I usually just smile and nod, but in my mind a few R-rated words pass through.
But I look at it from a positive point of view: my daughter is just trying to save her father from unnecessarily spending money on gas!
Check out the McDonald’s video that drives Jeff crazy…
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dan L Hays, Life As A Human. Life As A Human said: New Article, Driving Makes My Daughter Mad! – http://tinyurl.com/6k9cztz […]