Things I learned about travelling with a baby

• Take the time to count your daily diaper usage for a few days before your trip.  We could have halved the number of diapers we took.
• Apparently the TSA has to check one of each KIND of baby food puree you bring through.  Our DIA guy was nice and told us he would check only one out of three kinds (Beechnut jars, Gerber tubs, and an individual applesauce cup). We also could have checked all but one jar for the flight, but we were keeping the food together.
• If you are lucky enough to get a seat for your baby, use it with the carseat facing forward.  We did rear-facing on the way out.  Although it was nice to have Jack facing me, his car seat was very upright and we were still restricting the chair in front of him.  On the way home we put it front facing.  He had a lot of room to recline and no one in front or behind him was restricted.  With the cramped upright seat to Boston he slept 45 minutes, with lots of head lolling and furrowed brows.  With the reclined seat to Denver he slept 2.5 hours with that blissful pale baby face.  
• We need to teach Jack to drink with a straw.  That's how restaurants serve him water, and it would be so much neater than his sip and spit method from a cup.
• When you have two sleep sacks and one has been used for a week and one has been freshly laundered, take the dirty one.  We took the clean one.  Not sure if it would have made a big difference, but he was pretty freaked out about the strange room and strange crib.  A familiar scent on his blanket could have been soothing.
• We need to teach Jack to leave place mats and plates alone.  We cleared his table space like we do at home when we ate out.  It's works, but I felt embarrassed for the mess he leaves on the table. 
• Umbrella strollers rock for travel.

Happy to be home

And thus ends our epic adventure. Home safe and sound, jack did even better on this flight, slept 2.5 hours of it. We had our usual conversation on I70, professing my love for Colorado while cursing DIA. Chipotle, a lonely cat, and a giant pile of laundry await me. So TTFN!

Last leg of our journey

Please sleep until Kansas.

Shadow friends

Take the train

Apparently you can't walk directly tithe science museum. You can walk in a giant 45 minute loop though.

Cannoli

A snack on the north end, from a shop with a cat.

On the trail

Walking on the freedom trail to the science museum.

Already pushing jacks naps back

Walked to the public gardens this morning. The lake was drained! Boo, I wanted to see the swan boats.

10 months old

Oh right, Jack is ten months old now! fancy photos to come after the travel (maybe).

Out on the town

Cheesecake factory

On to session 2

Inspiring talks so far.

Hotels have cartoons on cable

Drums

This adorable band of boys led us to the exhibition. Wish I could have stayed for the show but I want to see my own boys!

Made it!

Whew! The Boston airport is so close to everything, I made it to the opening session even. Our hotel is beautiful, they even got us a crib! Glory be! Ben took jack to cate and trevors house to (hopefully) nap while I'm here. Then I'll brave mass transit alone to meet them for dinner. What a day!

Bird in an airport

Dia is so hipster ;-)

Ps we landed safe and sound. Jack was a handful but fairly quiet. Can't imagine doing this with a generally fussy kid.

Ready for take-off

Getting the wiggled out before our flight.

A text from Ben while at work

"he made his first fort." Love it. He's total boy.

One more to tide you over

Since I won't be posting much video this next week.

Traveling soon

I'm cleaning out my phone because we're leaving town this weekend and I want to have lots of space for new pictures and videos!  That's right, we're packing up our almost 10 month old across the country to Boston.  I'm attending the ANNA conference there, we'll see some friends, maybe Grandma, and get a little old country flavor.  So here are some random pictures I liked.

Sort of crawling

Jack has really advanced his motoring over the last week!  He picks himself up off the ground to a sitting position and goes back down on his own.  He gets in a crawl position, but only advances one knee before giving in to rolling again.  Ben helped me get some video of him, because every time I whip out my camera he stops moving around.  (The last minute or so of this is pretty boring.  I just kept the camera rolling with no real action.  A true snapshot of our home, I suppose).

Two Dads

Hey, fellow high school friends, check out these two dads and their cute kids.  Can you believe it?

You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown

Aw, Amanda's kids did so good! The show was so colorful and funny, and the dancing was pretty good too ;-) 

Helping

Enjoying the crispy grass

We detoured from the usual block walk to roll on the grass in the little park near our house.  Jack was fascinated by this ground, covered with this crumbly stuff that he could pick up.

Ben noted the lack of ceiling and starting tossing Jack around, to his great delight. 

Some video of the adventures.

By special request

I hear you.  You don't want texty posts about work.  You want Jack Action!  I can deliver :-)

We started playing catch with Jack. I thought it was luck that the ball rolled back to me, but now I'm thinking he actually guides it. Cooperative play is da bomb, y'all.



Here's more playing catch, shot from a fun angle. He stops playing part way through and flops around, ending with a fart.



This last one is for Betty. She wanted to see how Jack motors around. Of course, he slowed down right when I pulled out the camera. This movie is slower in action, but it does show off his maneuverability.

I tired.

As 19 hour shifts go, this was a good one.  I got to work at 5:30 to start setting up for the day.  The first patient I was supposed to do as a portable in her room.  Her dark, warm, room that was not in the ICU, she was just on isolation for flu.  I was not happy about spending the morning in there wearing a hot gown and mask in this yucky room with what turned out to be a very crabby, whiny lady.

But hurrah!  Someone in the ICU showed up who was more emergent so I started on her instead.  The second lady was in kind of scary shape.  Her K was 6.9 and her heart was in a wide QRS tachy complex.  While I was setting up machines her telemetry was dancing all over the place with missed beats and other scariness.  They had an AED next to her just in case.  But lo, within 20 mintues of me starting treatment she smoothed out into a sinus rhythm.  Science is real, yo.  I was happy about that, plus she had a really nice nurse for me to work with.

I was ready to head back to the main HD room of craziness, but another ICU emergency appeared.  This one a patient I know very well who had a K of 8.0.  Geez, people!  Again, within an hour she was doing much better.  These two portable treatments were very low stress compared the frantic pace of working a Monday in our room.  I even finished a book.

So when they told me I had to stay because I was on call to do two patients in our unit who wouldn't be done until midnight, I was ok with that.  I was long over due for some call back.  I have pretty good luck with not having to go in very often.  I took a real dinner break before going up there around 8:30.  My first patient came off about 30 minutes after that and I was down to one really nice guy who just couldn't breathe well.  It was cool to be able to get him from 10 L at 88% to 5 L oxygen at 100% as the treatment went on.  There was a fair amount of chores to do that the day team didn't have time to get done, so that kept me occupied.  When the timer rang I quickly got the patient out of the room (yay for fast clotters!)  and got in my bed by 1:30 am. 

The saddest part of the night was when Brian texted me to say trivia round 7 was about musicals!  Boo!  Wish I could have been there.  Oh well.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.

(PS: Potassium (K) should be between 3.5 and 5.0.  You can get admitted for dialysis when it's at least 5.2.  Higher than 6.0 things get a little scary for your heart).

Crunching carrots in a Sunday afternoon.

Stockinette Ennui

I grew weary of my purple cardigan, with its endless all knits, then all purls.  Such tiny yarn, and wo, I'm so far from the fun smocking section! So I cast on a new cardigan with my handspun yoke.  It's bulky and uneven and quite fun.  This one starts with the patterned yarn (top-down knitting, my other cardigan was bottom-up knit).  I tried it on tonight to see if it's fitting ok.  Not bad!  Sure I could tweak it here and there, but it's kind of a rough and wild cardi.  I'll keep going.  Hopefully I have enough yarn to finish! I'm all out of matching roving to spin any more.

(The pattern is the Shalom Cardigan.  I'm doing it with 7 mm needles, no mods to the pattern so far.)

Date Night (er, Afternoon)

Ben and I are bad at going out on dates since we became parents.  I could count on one hand the number of dates we have had since last summer.  Let's see, The A Team, Inception, Scott Pilgrim, the zoo date, . . .  that might be it.  Did I miss any, Ben?  Maybe we went to Virgilio's once without Jack?

Luckily, I have an awesome sister who helps us overcome this.  For Christmas we received tickets to Colorado Ballet with babysitting included!  Today I cashed in.


We got all dressed up to see a matinee of Romeo and Juliet.  Fantastic show, if a little light on the dancing and heavy on the emoting as it wound down.  Sumptuous costumes, interesting choreography, and a live orchestra.  So much fun.  I only wish they could have gotten together in the end ;-)

After the show we walked a few blocks down 14th to a new restaurant, Euclid Hall.  We were surprised when they told us it was 5280 Restaurant Week!  We usually look forward to this every year but hadn't given it any thought this time around.  Participating restaurants offer a special menu of options for a dinner for two for $52.80.  This place had most of their menu on the list.  We took advantage of it and had an awesome meal.  We ordered:

Pickle Sampler (Sweet Bread and Butter Pickles, Hops Infused Pickle, Hot, Spicy and Very Sincere Pickles, Seasonal Pickles)
Roasted Cauliflower Salad, shishito pepper marmalade, Haystack goat cheese, scallions, tempura crunchies
Beef Short Rib Kielbasa  
Boudin Noir, avec curry e aubergine
Roasted Duck Poutine, duck gravy, black pepper, Wisconsin cheddar curd 
Griddled Camembert and Peach Preserve Sandwich, Waldorf salad
Red Velvet Cupcake, 7 minute frosting
Funnel Cake Fried Bananas, peanut butter caramel

So yum.  We got home in time to chat with ma soeur for a bit and put Jack to bed.  Thank you again, Amanda, for a wonderful afternoon out!

And not so much

Another day off today, with much less done, but the same warm feeling.

I spent a lot of the day knitting and watching silly tv murder mysteries (psych, bones, and castle).  Also playing with Jack.  I took him up to the mountains for rehearsal today.  The kids are doing quite good.  They know the dances well enough to pass the point of embarrassment.  It's a respectable attempt.  Let's see if in the next two weeks we can tweak them to the great level.

Yeah . . . really didn't do much.   Made lunch and dinner and indulged in some baby time.  And I'm ok with that.  :-)

A day off that felt kind of normal

Wow, today feels great!  Don't you love it when your internal light switch flips on and you get things DONE? I haven't felt like this since . . .  September?  Pre-Jack even?  Maybe it's the gorgeous weather today.  Not getting called back to work like I expected last night helps too.  (There's a CRRT I was SURE would clot before midnight.  I guess it didn't.)  Here's my day so far, and it's not even 4pm.

• Cleaned up the clutter in the living room
• Rearranged dining furniture
• Vacuumed (it's a big deal.  Really.)
• Helped Jenn with a knitting pattern question in an overly long email
• Fed Jack milk
• Played with Jack
• Fed Jack chicken and veggies and a sippie cup of water
• Did not have to change Jack's clothes
• Re-cleaned off the table
•  Installed a new car stereo

• Yo, did you catch that?  I INSTALLED a car stereo.  Like a man.  Wiring and everything.
• Got Ben some new banjo strings
• Got drinks and tots at Sonic happy hour with new car stereo
• Started cooking dinner
• Loaded dishwasher
• Blogged a couple times
• Backed up my iphone and hard drive
• Baked cookies

 What's left for the day?  Finished the pork fried rice for dinner, eating cookies, and knitting while watching Jimmy Fallon.  Maybe a block walk with the baby and dog.  They like that sort of thing.

Here's to days off!

PS: new car stereo is awesome.  I paid even less than that, using birthday money.  It has a USB and aux port on the front, so I can charge my phone while playing music directing from it, with controls on the stereo.  Mmmkay, going to eat cookies now. 

A pretty slop mat.