…is a Trader Joe's ice cream sandwich.

I remember this from the end of my last pregnancy: you can only eat tiny amounts of food at a time, because your stomach is located somewhere in your vertebrae and smushed to the size of a pea. What this means is that I've gotten really weird-specific about what I want to ingest. It has nothing to do with nutrition, the time of day, the amount of ice cream I have already eaten over the past twenty-four hours…all it has to do with is WANT THAT NOW.

For example:

I no longer want peaches, strawberries, mangos, or any of the other fruits that I've spent the past nine months obsessing over. Instead, I would like cantaloupe and watermelon, and all of it, please.

On Monday, I wrote about five things I was really glad I brought along with me this summer.

Now, let's talk what I lugged all the way across the country…only to have sit unused in my closet, making me crazy (because when I look at the items listed below, all I can see is the potential for Overweight Luggage fees coming my way upon our return trip).

City girls don't get many opportunities to pick strawberries. As lovely as strawberry-picking sounds, I've never been before in my life, and neither has Indy. So this weekend, since Kendrick had work and I'm trying to see as much of the area as possible before the baby gets here, we went on a little just-the-two-of-us adventure wayyy out to more or less the middle of nowhere.

(There were stops to pick wildflowers by the side of the road, of course.)

Road-tripping is kind of our traveling sweet spot. It's our thing. (Apparently so much so that we glow when we do it. Thank you, Instagram filter.)

I was telling a friend about my fantasy of taking a family Route 66 road trip one day, and she said something like "That would be my personal version of hell." And while I certainly understand that not everybody gets particularly jazzed about the idea of sitting in confined spaces for days on end and subsisting largely on gas-station beef jerky...

I love it.

Possibly.

I mean, they have dinosaurs on them, so that's about a zillion points right there. AND they belong to the genre of footwear that lights up when you run or jump, so I'm not sure how, exactly, one would make a toddler shoe that is better.

For real, they may very well be my son's favorite thing on the planet at this particular moment in time. The first words I hear when he wakes up are no longer "ORANGE JUICE," but rather "Let me put on my dinosaur shoes please?" and virtually every other shoe in his wardrobe has been not just abandoned, but full-on shunned.