Jiffy Lube

The past weekend we traveled to St. Louis to meet up with some dear friends from graduate school.

We do this on a (mostly) annual basis and it's pretty much the highlight of my year.

It forces us to realize these crazy graduate students have morphed into functioning, high-achieving professionals with really cool kids.  I'm proud of my friends! (And their spouses!)  When we come around the St. Louis zoo has met its match!

The car ride each year does test our road trip finesse.  St. Louis is five and a half hours away from us, so we were in the car for what felt like an eternity to the girls.

As we arrived in St. Louis Isaiah saw a Chipotle.  That's a big deal for the country bumpkins from Oklahoma.

He loves Chipotle.  I hate Chipotle.  If there's a need for a black bean on a burrito with rice I haven't ever seen compelling evidence for it – nope, Taco Bell is the way I roll.

So, we were at a stop light and Isaiah was salivating over Chipotle.  I rolled the window down and took a fresh breath of non-roadtrip funked air and said, "Ah!  That smells good!"

"You're smelling Chipotle!" Isaiah said quickly.

"I'm definitely not smelling Chipotle," I responded.  There was no way I was going to admit anything good came from the rice burrito place.

Isaiah spied a Jiffy Lube on the opposite corner from Chipotle and pointed out, "Well, you certainly aren't smelling Jiffy Lube!"

The tickled my funny bone and I giggled about the scent of oil changes.

Mia picked up on the giggles and chirped from the back seat:

"That smells like chicken boobs?" 

Instead of simply correcting her misunderstanding of what we had been saying that made me laugh harder and I gasped, "No, Mia, those are breasts…"

I was laughing pretty hard by this point and so was Isaiah.

Mia was still perplexed in the backseat, staring out the window.

She thought for a long minute and said:

"This… This is not how I dreamed it would be."

The end.