Wedding Bells and Lobster Rolls

Sadie at wedding

We've been out of town for the past week, traveling first down to Fallbrook for my sister's wedding, then up to the Bay Area to visit all of our friends and family. It was a great but exhausting trip, as evidenced by the fact that the baby has been sleeping with very few breaks from the time we got home yesterday evening, up until now. As I write this post, she's been asleep for 2 hours. Of course, now that I'm in the middle of a project I predict she'll wake up about two minutes from now.

I'll post again with more details, but for now the broad overview of the trip: it presented a ton of challenges, and we managed to conquer almost all of them. How, for instance, do you sleep in the same room as a baby who is used to having a room all to herself since she was 4 weeks old? Answer: you stick her in the closet. Or, if a closet is not available, you rig up a makeshift wall by thumb-tacking three sheets to the ceiling and draping them over the crib. (Then you proceed to stress about the baby having enough air to breathe at night.) In the first case it worked like a charm; in the latter case, not as great, and she woke up a bunch of times during the night. But it could have been much worse.

In all other ways, she behaved like an angel, considering she was besieged by new faces every single day, all getting up in her grill to go, "Oooooooh!" On a couple of occasions she did get spooked by this, but for the most part she handled the barrage of new information with good humor and curiosity. She charmed my old college friends, reunited with her aunt, met her great-grandfather, and attended a wedding reception where she was unfazed by the loud thumping baseline of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance."

Car travel was made easier by our recent upgrade from the Snugride infant seat to a larger convertible carseat. We went with the Graco MyRide, which Scott insists has the best ratings and wasn't super expensive, either. Sadie definitely prefers not having her feet poking out over the edge of her carseat, and not having her head flopping from side to side helps, too.

In development news (I love posting the new things she's doing), Sadie now reaches her arms out towards you when she wants to be picked up. She yells at you when you leave the room, and leans into you when you hold her. I'm teaching her how to kiss -- that is, I'm covering her face in kisses while saying, "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" I'm not sure if she's learning anything new from it, but she definitely thinks I'm crazy. Still no rolling over, but I'm learning to appreciate her immobility while it lasts.