"Are We There Yet?"

By Doug

"Are weeee there yet?"

Do you know what is the worst part about that question? I mean, aside from the given fact that it can drive you up the wall further and faster than most any other question out there? It's that sometimes the child saying it knows that it's annoying...and does it anyway.

Purely to tweak you.

That's how Brady can be. Oh sometimes, it's legit. She's really bored, or cranky, and really tired of the drive.

Other times?

I don't even need to see her to know she's got a gleam in her eye, and she just wants to mess with the parental units.

Sometimes it's only an hour into the drive. Sometimes it's a half hour in.

Sometimes it's shortly after we get out of the driveway.

"Are we there yet?"

Of course, we play along initially. We do the "we'll get there when we GET there" line from The Incredibles one or two (or five or six times). Then we'll get sarcastic and say, "yep, we're here. This spot in the road right here is our final destination."

Oddly enough, the novelty fairly quickly wears off. Not that it's going to stop her from resurrecting the dead horse just to flog it some more.

There must be something that's prebuilt into a child's mind at birth that says, "you know what's funnier than saying a joke once? Repeating it FIFTY times! In a row!"

"Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet?"

The hard part is to not get truly angry at her, though Lord knows I'd love to. Because, unlike those times where she's truly being bbecause she's really just trying to be funny, nothing more. She wants to make us laugh the one way she (thinks she) knows how.

So, we push on. And time somehow seems to stretch longer. Has it really only been five minutes? Really?

The next step in our attempt to salvage some sanity, is to turn the tables and ask her if we're there yet over and over. One would think that if you pull the reverse psychology trick, then they would easily see the error of their ways. You know, the old "smoke a box of cigarettes to prevent further smoking" trick.

I wonder if that ever worked on people?

Anyway, we'd start asking her "are we there yet? How about now?" over and over and over, thinking eventually she's going to get tired of it as much as we're tired of hearing it.

As it turns out, that's even funnier!

So, we quickly abandon that, turn the radio up a bit louder, and resign ourselves to the fact that this will never ever stop. Ever.

Or at least until we get to our destination. Two hours later.

Hu-friggin-zah! Now we can relax and enjoy our trip to (insert fun place to be here). Until it's time to go home, and the cycle begins anew.

Joy.

PS: You want real fun? Drive eight hours to Vegas. And back.