"DADDY!!!!!!!!"
"It's okay," I comforted my screaming child "Daddy's going to work. He'll be back soon."
He would have none of it.
We drove off and he was still screaming for daddy. I shouted over his cries:
"DO YOU WANT ME TO SING YOU A SONG?"
He replied:
"YEAH!!!!!"
I began a combination of yelling/singing:
"The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, the wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town!"
That worked...for a while. Then the screaming commenced again. It occurred to me that he could be hungry. So I asked:
"Are you hungry?"
He replied:
"COOKIE!!!!"
Which I took to mean "Yes I am hungry."
"Okay, okay," I said trying to calm myself down yet feeling like I wanted to jump out of the car into oncoming traffic "We'll stop and get something to eat. We can't stop right now though."
I wasn't lying to him. We were on an incredibly busy road with no restaurants or stores in sight.
He was wailing:
"MAMA COOKIE MAMA COOKIE!"
All of a sudden I got a funny feeling something was not right. The wailing sounded muffled. I turned around to find that he had unbuckled his car seat and he was hanging to the side from his torso up, wailing away.
"ARI! SIT UP!" I yelled frantically.
I looked for a place to pull over, but there was none in sight.
I begged and pleaded with him to sit up. But he continued to lean over the side of his car seat crying and screaming. This child is Houdini! I thought to myself. How did he manage to unbuckle his car seat?
Finally, he sat up and I breathed in.
I almost started to cry when I saw the Dunkin' Donuts in the distance. We pulled over, I took him out of the car seat and into Dunkin' Donuts.
"Are you hungry?" I asked him once again
"Yeah," Ari said smiling
"Do you want a bagel?"
"Yeah!" He said
"Can you give me a kiss?"
He did.
