Our Trip to Maryland, pt.1

Friday 11/9 – Ian had a bad night last night, waking up several times, miserable. I think we are having another round of tooth trouble, since I noticed he had practically his whole hand in his mouth and was pulling his hair like crazy. I gave him some Motrin around 2:30, and than he settled until 6:00. I nursed him back down at that point and he slept until it was time to get him up at 8:00. I took the morning off to finish getting ready to go, so I took him in to daycare as usual. It’s pretty much impossible to get a lot of work done with him around. But even so, I really hadn’t accomplished everything by the time David got home and we had to finish getting things together and packing the car together.

We finally got on the road around 2:30. The drive just seemed incredibly long. It didn’t help that it was rainy and miserable most of the way, and of course, we ended up stopping more than we would have in the past, which made it take even longer. Ian did conk out for about an hour later in the afternoon, which was good. I had gotten him a new, larger Magna-Doodle board, which we had a lot of fun playing with in the car, though. In addition to the pen attachment, it came with four magnetic shape stamps, which Ian got a big kick out of, too. I would draw things and he would erase them, or stamp over them as fast as he could, laughing. We drew houses and bridges, trees and monkeys, until it started to get dark. We also played a bit with his LeapPad book reader, before it got too dark to see. At that point, I got out my laptop and played DVD’s for Ian to watch Elmo and Curious George.

We ended up not getting to Heather and Pete’s until around 9:30. We took the key stuff for the night in, and David set up his crib so I could get him to sleep as quickly as possible. He was very overwhelmed at first. He was excited and interested to see new people, but Heather has two large birds, macaws, I think, and their screeching scared and upset him. Also, by that point, he was very over-tired. And over-tired and over-stimulated is not a good combination! But I did manage to get him to settle enough to get him to sleep. He had a very restless night and was up frequently, wanting to nurse, mostly for comfort. Also, I had forgotten his special music CD, so we didn’t have that to help him settle either. It was a long night.