I hope they have ear plugs.

This weekend, my mom and I are checking out of the mental hospital in which we apparently live, and are getting back in the car with Bryce and Quinn for five or six hours. See, in our family, we like to push our luck. Have an unnaturally good experience where the stars align properly and a long weekend trip to a cabin in the woods doesn't result in face-melting shrieks? Experience a miracle wherein trekking across West Texas with pint-sized professional humiliators actually results in a mere two or three moments of wishing your restaurant chair would sink into the floor and all of these nice patrons would stop staring at the kid screaming about his digestive problems? Well, by all means, let's test out those statistics! Sure, it's completely unrealistic to hope for three mildly successful summer trips in a row, but a break with reality has never stopped us before. Onward and upward, lunatics!

We're going to visit my mom's soft-spoken and completely happy and unsarcastic sisters, and my even more innocent and peaceful Russian cousin-in-law, who happens to have two kids - one Bryce's age, one Quinn's age. Those poor, sweet children don't realize what's about to come their way. The older one is actually looking forward to the visit, wanting to have pictures of his cousins to take back to Russia with him, I'm assuming to commemorate the weekend his eardrums will burst when Quinn inevitably decides that, NO, no one besides Quinn is actually allowed to touch anything without his prior approval I WILL SHRIEK UNTIL YOU COMPLY WITH MY RULES, O MINIONS.