We’ve become professionals when it comes to traveling with the kids. We have separate toys that stay in separate backpacks for travel, I can pack with my eyes closed two hours before a flight and I can run the gauntlet of an unfamiliar Whole Foods in 10 minutes flat while grabbing every essential item we need for snacks and meals.

But this trip threw me for a bit of a loop. We just had the kids empty their school backpacks and throw some stuff in there instead of digging out the travel backpacks. That meant we didn’t have any crayons or PlayDoh for the plane. Ugh. I also tried packing for our overnight trip to the lake and our longer California trip at the same time. Which meant Emmie ended up with no pajamas at all for the longer trip. Awesome. And then when we arrived, I was exhausted (see: waking at 4 a.m. for 6 a.m. flight with three kids) and not thinking clearly when I made my Whole Foods run.

While I managed to remember a bunch of snacks, 27 pounds of organic produce, 2 gallons of milk and a box of mac and cheese, I couldn’t remember that I needed butter to make said mac and cheese. And of course, I didn’t realize this until I was back at the hotel looking at the box of mac and cheese and thinking about making it.

After a good night’s sleep (that ended at 4:50 a.m. when the kids woke up, you know, still on their little Central Time body clock schedules), I figured out I could just grab some butter packets from the hotel breakfast spread. Genius!

Corralling three kids at a breakfast buffet requires more than two hands, so unfortunately, I didn’t have a free hand to carry the butter. But I had pockets! So I put them in my pocket and used my free hand to wrestle a forbidden piece of candy snuck from the front desk away from my 8-year-old.

As we got in the car a short time later, I both heard and felt an odd crunch coming from my pocket. That’s weird, I thought to myself, but continued on with my drive. A few minutes passed before I had a sinking feeling about that odd crunch. I was now entering the freeway when I gingerly maneuvered my hand under the seatbelt and into my pocket to discover that yes, one of the butter packets broke as I sat down. My pocket was now filled with butter. And as it had spent some time in my pocket, it was melty and viscous. Perfect for making cookies, not so perfect for the wearability of my shorts.

I unbuckled my seatbelt so I could more easily pull the offending packets out of my pocket, which set off cries of “Mommy! Put your seatbelt back on!” from the peanut gallery. I grabbed a rogue piece of Kleenex, but was unable to contort my body in the necessary fashion and keep the vehicle on the road, so I gave up and let the gooey substance saturate my shorts.

I guess the bright side is that if I need a piece of bread buttered, I can just rub it in my pocket for a minute and it will come out perfectly coated.