CMC's 2nd Road Trip

We just got back from a short weekend away w/ CMC. Technically, it's his 2nd road trip. However, it might as well be his first. The last one was when his grandparents were over here visiting from the UK. We had a full car and the baby was mostly asleep for the two hours that we were on the road. This trip was supposed to be four and a half hours long. It seems that with a baby, you should add an extra hour for every two hours on the road. So with that factored in, along w/ the horrendous traffic we had driving through NYC and up towards New England via Connecticut, found us on the road for almost eight hours.

Eventually we settled into our hotel room while Tom went off to catch the tail of the "Winner's Dinner" he was supposed to attend that night (but had to give up his seats since we were running soooo very late) and I settled down to get my son settled in. It's not easy giving a ten month old a bath in a hotel bathroom in a plastic inflatable bathtub shaped like a rubber duck. Thus far this duck has managed to just make him scream. I figured that if I let him play w/ it and the bath toys maybe it won't be so traumatic. I was right and wrong. He cried but not so much.

So here I was thinking I finally got him settled down for the night when Tom comes back, all pumped up and bangs the door trying to get in. I had forgotten to take off the security latch. Bam! The baby is awake. Wide awake at 10 o'clock no less. So Daddy took him down to the bar where the rest of his associates were mingling after this dinner. I had myself a margaritas and it is glad I am that I did. As tired as I was, I slept right through the tossing and turning of father and son on the king size bed. I didn't want to stress out the baby even more by sticking him in the play yard in a strange room after the day he had. According to his father he kept waking up every two hours. My theory is that the baby kept waking up because he wasn't sure if he was still trapped in that car seat.

The next morning started off pretty well considering his disrupted routine so far. He ate his breakfast, attended Daddy's recognition meeting, tried to steal the microphone from Daddy when he was speaking on stage, just being his usual self. Eventually the crankiness appeared so I whisked him off to our room to get him to take a nap. My son didn't take a nap, he took a four hour long coma!
Eventually he woke up, I fed him, changed him, dressed him, and off we went to see Daddy again. We came back upstairs when his conference ended and the three of us spent the next few hours, hanging out in our room in our undies, just chilling. My son is pretty fun to hang out with considering he's only 10 months old.

He took a short nap (cut off because he needed to eat his dinner as did we). Again, it was well after 10 pm and little boy was still awake. Thank God I'm still breast feeding. Breast milk is truly magic. It's the one thing guaranteed to knock him out. But the stress of the weekend finally caught up to me and I ended up w/ a migraine at 3 in the morning. All I could think was I can't go to work like this tomorrow. I have to get home, I can't deal w/ another day like Friday. So after much throwing up, and Tom having to drive down to the gas station down the road for some much needed medication, I finally shut down and slept. By the time I woke up, father and son were packed up and ready to go. So we were finally on the road.

This time, we got on the road after the boy was fed and it was almost time for his morning nap. We got on the road and eventually he passed out. Yippie! So we kept driving down a nice open road for a good two and a half hour to three before the boy actually woke up. So we stopped, ate, fed the baby, relaxed for an hour and they continued on our journey. And this time, he was wide awake. I learned from the last trip to arm myself w/ snack (a lot of them), toys, water, and prayers. He did get bored but at least he worked his way through all this toys and blanket first. Then he had his snack. At this point in the journey we were in Brooklyn and that's when we heard the noise. Yup, the smell alerted us to the fact that our baby had pooped! And boy was it stinky! Without any rest stops, we had to drive home in the stinky car but thankfully, he didn't cry too much and actually fell asleep.

So we were home. Baby was changed and happy to see his cats. Though I can't say how happy they were to see him. And the road trip was over. We were finally home. I can't wait to do it again. Learned a lot during that trip. We take our cues from him and hope there's not traffic up ahead. It was a fun trip despite all the obstacles and hardships we encountered. Maybe that's the real lesson here. Life isn't easy. When things become difficult, you have to keep going ahead, just ploughing through.

I could have stayed home while Tom went onto this conference. Then I wouldn't have gotten pictures of me drinking margaritas w/ my son at the hotel bar at 11 pm at night or the fact that he learned how to control his tongue and kept sticking it out and making weird noises. Those few hours before dinner where the three of us just sat around doing nothing, chatting, laughing together, sitting around just in our undies. I would have missed the drive home. In the end, as stressful as the weekend was, I wouldn't have missed it for the world. And so ends the tale of CMC's 2nd road trip.