Just Another Ordinary Miracle: Road Trip, Phase 1

Our road trip has begun! First stop is Ohio to visit family and celebrate Thanksgiving. We decided to make the normally-9-hour drive over two days, given that Zain’s previous long trip in the car was about and hour and a half. We drove to Akron the first night. Normally a 5.5 hour trip, it took us about 8 hours with baby-feeding, dog-walking, and parent-stretching stops. So we figure for the rest of the trip, we’ll take Google Maps’ estimate of trip length and add 50%. Zain did pretty well on the trip. We’re learning how to keep him happy when he’s tired of the car seat, including dealing with the sun. And Shif is learning interesting ways to breastfeed in the back seat in gas station parking lots (I’m not sure she’ll let me take or post a picture, but it’s amusing).

Zain's first hotel room

Life in the car seat

Binda babysitting

Zain has been a bit difficult to get to sleep lately, but that might be the result of a growth spurt more than anything else. He’s developed all sorts of new skills in the last week or so. First, he’s finally gotten his hands somewhat reliably into his mouth. For the record, thumb first entered mouth in the restroom of a McDonald’s along I-90 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Since then, he hasn’t been able to get the thumb back there, but his fist makes regular appearances and he slurps away on it. This is his new favourite hobby. Second, he’s started to pull to a stand with our help. For a week or so, he’s been doing “sit-ups” where we hold his hands and he pulls himself up to a sitting position. But a couple days ago, I was doing this and he just kept going and pushed himself right up to standing. He loves to stand up and look around. The view must be so much better from high up.

Zain’s taken pretty well to all these new environments he’s been in. Each new place we’re in, we have to assess where to put him to sleep, whether we use the pack ‘n play or co-sleeper or something else, if the room is too dark or too light, if there’s enough outside noise that we need white noise, how much furniture we need to move in order to plug in the monitor, where to take a bath….