Parker's First Camping Trip!

On Friday, July 16th, we loaded up the car and headed east and a bit north... We are going camping! Parker is 4 weeks and about 1 hour old as we hit the road, and we're prepared for some interesting challenges camping with a toddler and an infant.

First big change: in the interest of having more room, we finally flip Maia's car seat to forward facing for the first time. "I riding backwards!" she shouts repeatedly, with delight.

Since we were hitting the road at about dinner time, and we usually don't stop until about 2 1/2 hours in, I know that Maia won't make it that long without eating (she refused when I tried to feed her dinner early), so we opt to drive through McDonald's and see if she'll eat some chicken nuggets. She did. FIVE of them.

So we had a pile of toys I thought would keep her busy until she fell asleep. One of the new ones I bought was a little toddler laptop, which was a little beyond her, but she enjoyed it so much, that she played with it through most of Ontario, and refused to go to sleep in her car seat crying "I want my 'puter!" at 10:30 p.m, when she was very much exhausted. Eventually she fell asleep, and we continued our drive to our hotel.

Parker? Parker slept... then woke up and cried to eat, get a clean diaper, and then slept some more. Parker did great!

At about 1:30 a.m., we arrived at our hotel in Trenton, ON. We'd stayed there several times before on this same basic trip. It's always been a relatively crappy hotel... but usually clean. This time, however, it was graced by a little line of drunk 20-somethings out front, which made Ray pretty nervous, and he decided to bring the bikes inside. Maia got her second (third?) wind, and we had a repeat of the Interlochen hotel fiasco: jumping on the bed, lots of loud talking, much needing to explore, refusing to settle down. Ray, however, was exhausted, and needed to sleep, and finally asked me to take her for a ride in the car to get her to sleep. Yeah. That didn't work. Driving through this sleepy town surrounded by pitch black farm land... I could hardly keep my eyes open, so we returned to the hotel. Ray was asleep, and although she was still awake, she had calmed down a bit. She continued to insist "Mommy, lay down to me?" and I remembered what worked from our last hotel stay: I laid down with her, but deliberately turned my back to her (thereby removing her audience) and after a while she finally fell asleep.

We hit the road the next morning, and got McDonald's on the road again (options few, and we didn't want to do a big sit-down breakfast). We arrive in Massena around 1 pm the next day, the trip taking us a few extra hours due to feeding and diapering our bigger family! Maia's second half of the trip was much better, less whining, more occasional napping. We did, however, get stuck on the Ogdensburg bridge for a while. We were extremely fortunate in that Uncle Wayne and Aunt Mary, who just bought themselves a 30 foot hard wall camper, offered it to us for the week to make our lives a little easier. We were concerned about tenting with a newborn, but it turns out, the newborn was the easy part... it was the toddler who was noisy and difficult to get to sleep!

Parker's feet touch New York soil for the first time.

Parker continued to do well: loving the warm air, content to be cuddled by various family members. His awake time has been increasing, and he's becoming more interested in looking, listening and cooing. He loves to be talked to, cuddled and kept warm. He always looks at his sister when she talks to him, and she's happy to tell everyone about "My beebee bruth-ah!" The proud big sister.

Maia was delighted to be outside all the time, happy for all the extra attention and people to talk to and quickly became too overstimulated to settle down to sleep until hours after her bedtime. However, each day, we learned new things, and made sure we built in more down time by watching her That Baby dvd ("Watch my music, momma?") and within a few days, she had settled into a groove, and was able to take naps, and get to bed a little earlier each night.