OK, so yesterday I might have still been in a pissy mood underslept, which made my post seem a little harsh on traveling with a toddler.

So, today, in the spirit of actually being helpful, I present my real tips on traveling with a toddler. (and I promise no “drive at night when they’re sleeping” or “use Benadryl” tips)

1. Bring some items from home – I think that bringing Cordy’s fleece crib sheet and her crib toys helped a lot. I wanted the hotel room to feel like her room when she slept, so I tried to recreate her room with a few carefully chosen items. Aside from the first night, she slept very well.

2. But don’t overpack – While the crib sheet and crib toys were nice, I really didn’t need to bring the overflowing weekender diaper bag of toys with us. She barely had time to play with them, and in the end it just added 20 minutes to our check-out time, as I opened all the drawers in the room, looked behind the curtains, and climbed under the beds (let me tell you, ick) to retrieve every last Little People person.

3. Pack some food from home – Again, to help make things feel less foreign, a little food from home is a good thing. Otherwise, you’re stuck eating lunch in a food court that has few choices for toddlers, so you end up feeding the kid an overpriced grilled cheese sandwich with some type of fancy cheese on rosemary bread. Nice, but I don’t think she appreciated the upgrade to her sandwich; plain ol’ American on white would have been fine, and cheaper.

4. Plan time to run the child – No one likes to be kept in a stroller all day (or for 30 seconds, in Cordy’s case), so make sure the child gets plenty of time to crawl, cruise, toddle, or whatever. Run ’em hard, too. Make sure that they’re ready to collapse before putting them back in the stroller. At the very least, they won’t have as much energy to resist your attempts to restrain them.

5. Expect tantrums – Rare is the experience where you can travel with a baby or toddler and keep the child on their schedule. Somewhere, at some point, something will throw them off and set off a chain of events that will end with the kid on the floor crying and screaming, with you looking around for the quickest escape from the other people who are watching the spectacle with awe and annoyance. Realize it’s gonna happen, and there’s nothing you can do to totally prevent it. Just work on your best “I’m sorry” smile, and your best “I’ll rip your head off if you say one thing about my kid screaming” dirty look, depending on the situation.

And finally, one special tip for a select group of parents:

For parents who are on anti-depressants: deciding to cut back on your medication at the same time you are going on a long road trip with a toddler is a bad, bad, bad idea. Take my advice, and wait until you get back.

Now that we are back home, and I am hopefully nearing the end of my sleep deprivation from this weekend, I can reflect back on the experience of traveling with a 16 month old.

And what does my reflection tell me? NEVER EVER DO IT!!

OK, maybe I’m being a little harsh there. Maybe I should rephrase it to say “Never travel with MY 16 month old.” I’m sure some kids love to travel. There must be toddlers out there who don’t blink an eye at being transported to somewhere new and strange. Kids who don’t get cranky at being thrown off their schedule in any slight way.

The biggest problem I ran into was listening to all the advice out there on how to travel with a baby or toddler. It’s one of the big questions you can find on any parenting web site, and several baby books have their own chapters devoted to it.

I, for some stupid reason, blindly believed their advice. Not one shred of professional advice has worked for my daughter thus far, so why was I so naive to think that these tips and tricks might work to keep Cordy smiling and cheerful? Clearly no one told Cordelia that these were the things that were supposed to work on her.

Problem #1: The nuclear option. Even though you’ll probably never see it published in What to Expect, it’s the great secret of the Parent Club that Benadryl is the magic bullet for a happy traveling toddler. Moms half-whisper it to each other in playgroups, pediatricians advise it, off-record, of course. Parents are all over message boards, hinting at a teaspoon of Benadryl for a desperate parent, although always following it up with, “Of course, I’d never do it, but I’ve heard it helps.”

They all claim they’d never drug their own children, but hand out the advice to anyone who will listen. OK, maybe some of them have never tried it, but if you’re giving me dosing instructions, I somehow doubt you’ve never done it. Benadryl is well-known for inducing drowsiness in an otherwise restless and cranky toddler. Somewhere in the fine print is what most people leave out when giving you this advice: while it will make most kids drowsy, there is a small percentage that will turn into hyper-monkeys when given the stuff.

Cordelia didn’t want to sleep our first night in Chicago. I gave in at 4am and gave her a dose of Benadryl. Clearly I should have done a trial run with this stuff to see what would happen. But I was tired, and wanted her to be tired also. Turns out, she’s part of that minority. Benadryl is cocaine to her. She was wired for the next few hours.

Even though she was tired, her eyes were wide open, and she was a ball of non-stop energy – up, down, up, down, roll left, roll right, up, across the room, back again, open the drawer, close the drawer, up on the bed, down off the bed. Once it was finally wearing off, she laid on her tummy watching Wiggles, clearly exhausted but unable to close her eyes.

Problem #2: Driving at night. This was one that everyone told me to do. “Drive at night, when she’d normally sleep. Then she’ll sleep the entire way.” Yeah, well, good theory.

We didn’t follow the advice and instead drove to Chicago in the afternoon. No problems at all – Cordy didn’t really nap, but she was also content to stare out the window and look at the scenery. Driving home, we decided to try the plan of driving at night. The first hour, Cordy slept peacefully, and we congratulated ourselves on a good strategy. Then we stopped for gas and food, and Cordy woke up.

An alert toddler in the car is really not a problem during the day. An awake toddler in the car at night when she’s exhausted and there is nothing to look at is pure hell. I mean it – Satan himself was in the backseat laughing at us. That is, until he couldn’t stand her screaming any longer, then he said, “You’re on your own, folks. I’m going back to hell for some peace and quiet.”

The drive home was miserable, and Cordelia didn’t sleep again until we were home at 2am.

So, parents who may be considering traveling with your child, I give you this advice: don’t. Find a grandparent and leave the kid at home.

I can guarantee that by following this advice, you will not have to deal with an overtired toddler who is strung-out on Benadryl and a total grump to be around. I promise it will work for you.

(Of course, I am clearly insane, since I’m already talking about taking her next year. Although my mom said she wouldn’t go with us again, even if it was the last day of her life and the Stones were playing in Chicago and gave her a front row seat.)

For our last day in Chicago, I made my annual pilgrimage to Ikea. There are no Ikea stores in Ohio. We must travel either to Chicago or to Pittsburgh in order to visit the big blue box, and frankly, Chicago is further away, but there’s more to do there.

Ikea is my Mecca of home shopping. Lots of unique items, and best of all – cheap.

While we have thankfully outgrown our “College Eclectic” home decorating style, I still appreciate inexpensive but well-made home goods.

This year’s haul: two laundry bags and holder, a cute bin to hold Cordy’s toys, two wall-mount reading lamps for each side of our bed, a tunnel and play tent for Cordelia, and a little wooden wagon with wooden blocks for Cordy. Last year I found a bead puzzle, and that thing is still the most popular toy in the house.

After shopping and eating dinner, we picked up Aaron from the stage combat workshop, and began the long trek home. I drove the entire way, thanks in large part to the support of Mountain Dew Livewire. Yeah, I was a little slaphappy, too.

I can’t be sure, but I have a theory that there is a rip in the time-space continuum somewhere in Indiana along I-65. In this rip, what is normally only 2 hours feels like 20.

Time drags on, as you look at each road sign hopefully, praying you’ve covered 20 or 30 miles, only to find you’ve covered 5 miles. I swear that the section of I-65 between Gary, IN and Indianapolis is the single most boring stretch of highway in the world.

Also along that stretch is the Slowest Burger King in Indiana (TM). Aaron decided he really wanted Burger King for dinner on the way home, so we stopped off to fill the gas tank and let him get food. 20 minutes later, we were all in the car once again, all awake (including Cordy, thanks to the long wait), and ready to get back on the road.

We arrived safely in Columbus around 2am. A frantic dash was made by myself, my mom, and Aaron to quickly bring the unhappy (and still awake) Cordy inside, set up her crib with all of her must-have items, change her and prepare some milk for bedtime. After she was asleep, the three of us soon followed, exhausted from a very long weekend.

Today, I took Cordelia over to her grandpa’s for the day. I had the day off work, but I really needed some time away from her to get unpacked and also take a nap.

Aaron, on the other hand, had to go back to work today, and got to have a huge announcement dropped on him: his company laid off another 30 people today. A little over a year ago, they laid off 20 people and cancelled the telecommuting policy, forcing me to look elsewhere for another job. Now 30 more are gone.

Some are people I worked with for several years and I considered friends. I feel so bad for them; they were given no notice, and probably were given insultingly small severance packages.

Thankfully, Aaron escaped the axe, probably because he’s one of the poorly paid employees. Most of the people cut in his department were those who made better money. Hooray for being…underpaid?

Today was the return of Princess Crabby Poo.

Her return was completely by surprise. After all, Cordelia had a wonderful night. She slept through the night until 7:30am this morning.

She woke up happy, greeting everyone on the 7th floor of the Best Western Grant Park with a bright “Hi!” We packed up and prepared to walk across the park to the Shedd Aquarium.

So we were completely caught off guard when Princess Crabby Poo made her appearance shortly after we walked into the aquarium. The aquarium was packed, so she had a full audience for her scream fest. After several minutes of angry screaming (on her part) we let her out of the stroller to prevent one of the on-lookers from calling child protective services. She immediately tried to run from us.

We chased her for a half hour, trying to point out the turtles and fish and seahorses, but she didn’t care. “Look Cordy, there’s an eel! Look Cordy, there’s Nemo! Cordy? Where’d you go?” She wanted to run into the crowd and disappear. At one point she even darted between a tall man’s legs, trying to lose us. I know kids find their parents unhip at some point. I just wasn’t expecting it at 16 months.

It was time for lunch, and things were no better. We offered her milk, a banana, PB&J, but cranky-butt refused to be happy about anything.

We took her to see the dolphins, the beluga whales – she was not impressed. She was just surly.

The screaming continued when we tried to put her back into her stroller. At this point other small children were coming up to us, begging us to shut the toddler up.

Of course, their parents, trying to be polite, didn’t say a thing, and chose to just shoot us dirty looks instead. Even the Aquarium staff were making little comments, like, “I think someone needs to go take a nap.” Gee, you think? Or is that just polite speak for “Get out of our aquarium.”?

We finally decided to scrap the remainder of the day’s plans (we planned to go to the Field Museum) and walk back to the hotel for a nap. For all of us.

It’s a shame we had to spend the afternoon in the hotel. It was a gorgeous day outside, and it wasn’t even too cold. The sun was bright, the air was crisp but pleasant. Very unusual for Chicago winters.

Now, normally she’s just Princess Crabby. But today she chose to add the extra name of “Poo” to her title. She had 5, yes 5, poopy diapers today. This beats her previous record of 4, which she achieved yesterday.

You see, when we were packing on Thursday morning, Cordy must have peeked in the diaper bag and carefully counted the number of diapers I had packed. She would have noticed that I had averaged the number of diapers she tends to go through in a day (normally 4, plus one overnight diaper), and added a few more just to be safe.

Then she made it her mission to go through as many diapers as possible. As of today, with a full 24 hours of the trip remaining, we are out of diapers. *Sigh*

Plus, with all that pooping, this evening she developed the scarlet hiney. The painful, raw diaper rash from hell that no child should ever have to endure.

In the past hour we’ve had a bath, and she’s getting some much needed nakey-time. Besides, we’re out of diapers, and I still need to go beg my friend Lisa for a diaper for the night.

I’m hoping with all the energy I have left that Princess Crabby Poo will take a hike and give us back our happy little girl tomorrow.

Otherwise, it’s gonna be a long day of shopping.

Did I forget to mention I was going to Chicago this weekend?

Aaron has a stage combat workshop in Chicago every January (yes, we know, what a fabulous time to be in Chicago), and I usually come along for the sightseeing.

So yesterday we packed up the van we’re borrowing from Aaron’s parents, made sure the housesitter was comfortable and ready to spend a long weekend in, and then hit the open road.

Last year, Cordy was 4 months old, so we left her at home with my mom. This year, I wanted her to see Chicago, so she came along with us. Thankfully, so did my mom. Somehow, wrangling a 16 month old all by myself in Chicago seemed a little terrifying.

We were expecting Cordy to not enjoy the drive, but amazingly she was quiet and happy most of the way. Considering she barely slept in the car, this was an occurrence only slightly less miraculous than the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fatima.

Once we checked into our hotel, it was time to find food. We took a cab to the Rainforest Cafe. It’s a great place to keep little kids entertained – a jungle themed dining area, with large tanks of exotic fish, and animatrons of gorillas, elephants, and other animals making lots of noise. Cordelia loved it all.

I was worried about how well Cordy would sleep. In past months, whenever we have spent the night away from home, Cordy did not want to sleep. She would wake up, generally around 2 or 3am, and stay awake the remainder of the night, screaming.

She did not disappoint last night. 3:15am, she woke up and started screaming. Luckily, we have two hotel rooms, so Aaron wouldn’t be disturbed, since swinging swords on little sleep is just a wee bit crazy. Mom and I stayed up with her, and by 4am, I was ready to attempt the nuclear option: Benadryl.

Benadryl makes many children sleepy. For a small percentage, it hypes them up. Guess which group Cordy falls in. Go on, take a guess.

By 4:30am, we realized that she was not getting drowsy. Mom sent me back to bed in the other room, and she chose to stay up. Bless her. Cordy finally fell asleep again at 6:30am. So the day didn’t even begin for us until after 10am, when everyone was up.

Today’s sightseeing plan was all about the Navy Pier. More specifically, the Children’s Museum. In return for spending all day yesterday strapped in a car seat, Cordy got to run and play in a museum built just for little ones like her.

The Navy Pier is just amazing. There are unique shops, cozy cafes and restaurants, and lots of entertainers roaming the place. Had we been here in the summer, we could have taken a ride on the gigantic ferris wheel or a speedboat. However, today was very windy with a mix of rain and snow, so we preferred to remain indoors.

The Children’s Museum is attached to all of this, and it is three stories of fun. Many exhibits are for older kids, but there were a few designed just for the under 5 set. There were things to climb, water to splash in, bricks to build with.

Cordelia gives her seal of approval to the Tree House, with its wood and rope ramps and platforms, as well as the “stream” where she enjoyed catching plastic fish and shells and then beating them to death on the edge of the stream. Who knew she was part otter?

She also found a ramp and after a little practice discovered that it was great fun to climb the ramp, then flop onto her belly and slide back down it. This was repeated several hundred times.

The only unfortunate part of the day was trying to leave. We had been there for 4 hours, and it was clear that Cordelia was exhausted. But no matter how tired she was, leaving was not part of her agenda.

My mom and I both had to wrestle her into the stroller as she thrashed and screamed and arched her back. She screamed until she was purple in the face. Even her hair took on a reddish-purple tint. We attempted to placate her with chocolate from an amazing fudge shop on the Navy Pier, but she refused our peace offering. Of course, we didn’t really mind that – more pecan turtles for us, then.

Tomorrow we’re planning to go to the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. The Shedd has a fun dolphin show that we’re hoping Cordy will enjoy. Of course, she’ll probably spend the entire show trying to climb up and down the amphitheater seating.