Keep Your Eyes Open

Anybody ever read that book as a child? It's called Keep Your Eyes Open and is about two kids and their parents on a car trip. The gist was, if you keep your eyes open, you'll see so many things that you would have missed if you weren't napping or buried in an ipod or text message... or had your nose in a book.

Well - the book was written way before ipods and cell phones came along anyway...

But I remember it was purple and had a picture of two little kids, a boy and a girl with huge eyes resting on their arms looking out the back window of the car at all the things they would have missed. Obviously before the days when wearing a seat belt was the law... They saw cows, funny bridges that went up to let boats through, a purple house, etc.

On Saturday, Meri and I headed to Chicago to see some family, see a brand new nephew get baptized and another one get confirmed. It was a six hour drive... Meri and I talked, sang along with the radio and had a really good time. It's not very often she gets me all to herself for so long, so we made the best of the time we had together. Plus on the way back, we saw a car stuck in a cliff!I told her stories of my youth. She told me about her friends at school. I told her about a CB radio that my dad used to have and all the fun things we did with that. I also happened to mention that if you make your arm like you're flexing your muscles, then pull down a couple times when passing a semi, they'll honk their horn! She had never heard of that before. Intrigued, she asked if everyone knew that. Well... they used to!

So as we were passing a semi, she decided to try it. From her passenger seat, she saw the truck driver as we passed and pumped her arm a couple times. HONK HONK! Oh my! She was SO excited and laughed for about 10 miles!

I had opened a whole new world for her... She began seeing the truck drivers in a whole new light. They were just people driving trucks for long hours every day and sometimes a little girl pulling an imaginary horn gives them something to grin about. Some of the drivers were either in a bad mood or didn't see her, but during the course of the trip, she got about 6-7 trucks to honk back at her and she'd wave at them like a lunatic, smiling from ear to ear.

I'm holding my new nephew Mark. Isn't he a doll?

Once we got on the toll way, we didn't see anymore semi trucks, so the fun kind of died down... But by that time, I'd stopped at a book store and picked up a book that she was supposed to read by Wednesday, so then she had her nose stuck in the book...