We were an hour into a 3 hour trek back to our home in Tennessee when my wife and I noticed the smell: Our 2 year-old daughter, who had finally just fallen asleep after desperately needing to, had also just “dropped a load” in her diaper.

My wife and I barely had a verbal discussion about our immediate, yet difficult, decision:

We were not going to pull over the car and wake her up to change her diaper. Instead, we were going to drive 2 more hours while having to experience a permeating barnyard odor.

In life, it’s important to choose your battles.

And as somewhat seasoned parents, as we also have a 7 year-old son who also had to be trapped in the car with us, we decided the battle of losing time on our trip back home and having to deal with getting an extremely tired little girl back to sleep just wasn’t worth it.

For two hours, we only breathed through our mouths; yet still our eyes watered.

It wasn’t worth even attempting conversation. Normally, my wife and I would appreciate being able to have a normal conversation without being interrupted by our kids.

Yeah, not worth it this time.

It was just about powering through.

We tried rolling the windows down a little bit, but then we were in danger of the noise waking our daughter up.

To make it up to our son who was sitting next to his sister, we bargained with him: If you don’t complain about the smell, you can keep playing DinoCraft on the Kindle.

Since he is accustomed to not being able to play his game for more than an hour each day, he took the deal.

We survived. We made it home. It was brutal.

But we are family. We do what it takes to move forward together.

Poopy diapers and all.