Baby's First Christmas - Should you give gifts to an infant?

Yeah, it'll be evident in the pictures. We had Santa re-wrap some toys and re-gift them on Christmas for our little one. There were plenty of gifts from grandparents, siblings, and friends that we figured it wasn't necessary to add more to our already stuffed house. The little one seemed quite pleased to find the favorite mirror hiding in a stocking and the rattle wrapped in tissue paper. That is what matters to me - the JOY of celebrating Jesus' birth with family.

The First Trip Home After Moving Away is Tough

It is highly anticipated, usually coincides with a major holiday (Thanksgiving), involves coordination with family, other out-of-town guests, and possibly friends that still live nearby the hometown, and never quite works out as well as you'd like it to. Add an infant to that equation and you get a whole other bag of beans to deal with - maintaining a nap schedule with a 3 hour timezone change, keeping a consistent schedule while trying to visit with as many people in multiple places as possible, and feeding sufficiently and timely enough to maintain a happy, dapper child.

It is always great to be back home and visit with family and friends; however, it can also be somewhat stressful trying to keep everyone content. In my case, my parents and sisters (who had also drove or flown from out of town) wanted to see as much of my husband and me and the little one as possible, but they had their own schedules and families to juggle as well. My in-laws and brother-in-law (who had flown in from out of town) also wanted to see as much of my husband and me and the little one as possible. Likewise, since we were going to shortly be back West where we had few friends and family, my husband and I wanted to squeeze in as many visits and socializing events as we could into our short visit home.

We spent the first week of our trip trying to enjoy our family and friends and bickering with each other about where we'd be this day or this evening. We had done some pre-planning with a schedule before getting on the plane, but then other family plans changed and caused schedule conflicts. My family got the actual holiday, so his family should get three more days to make up for it, etc. I thought these kinds of debates had been settled our first year of marriage, but that was back when we lived near our family. Moving West had re-awakened the beast of holiday family time fights. And the three-hour time change and sleep deprivation of new parents didn't help things.


So in the end, we got to see a lot of our friends and family. We are still married. :)

We've decided that we can do better next time by communicating our original family plan early and often, and not trying to accommodate others as readily without considering the best interests of our family unit first. Easier said than done, I think.

Renting a House - Good "Trial Period" for Home Ownership

I just bought my husband a parks pass for his birthday. I had no idea what to get him - the guy that basically buys anything he wants as soon as he wants it. Well, that isn't entirely fair, but he does tend to buy things quite easily and then he wants me to "surprise" him on his birthday by getting him something he wants, but that he hasn't directly told me he wants anytime recently. How impossible is that? I can barely remember what it is I was supposed to pick up at the store for dinner that evening even with it written on the list in my hand, let alone remember some thing he mentioned months ago that he would be interested in having, but didn't actually already buy by the time his birthday comes around. I think I did OK this time. We'll see. It is going to arrive a couple weeks late.

So on to the main topic of this post: renting a house. Our heat didn't work since Sunday, but we got it fixed yesterday. A spider web had busted the ignitor. I guess that is a common problem. Seems like they could make spider-proof furnaces, but maybe not. When I'm bored, I'll look into that problem and see if I can't get myself a patent. Anyways, with the heat in full working order, I tried to make some pumpkin muffins for my husband's birthday and to have around when his brother and girlfriend come by tonight. The oven wouldn't heat up past 165 F. Now I have some gross gooey muffins sitting on my counter. Ugh. At least I have the toaster oven in case I really need to bake or broil anything. I'm going to make our landlord eat one as punishment. Just kidding. :) I like our landlord.

So after the fun with the oven, I had an appointment this morning to take my car into the Ford dealership to get a free battery check and my front license plate installed. I've been driving around illegally with only the back plate on my car - shhhh! Don't tell! I went out to the car, had my little guy all nice and cozy in his car seat, and then it wouldn't start. I think it is the battery. Ha! We'll see. My husband is going to pick one up at Costco tonight and see if replacing it fixes the problem. It hasn't been starting very well ever since we had it shipped out here. I guess I was a little slow in getting it to the shop, huh?

After I noticed that my car wouldn't start, I tried to open the garage door and the chain would move, the light would turn on, but the door didn't budge. The bolt holding the chain to the door had come loose. Handy-woman that I am, I was able to fix that myself. This renting a house thing is a good way to let us know all that can go wrong when you own one yourself, right? :)

I tried feeding my little guy some butternut squash today. He ate the first few bites just fine and then he started making this face, shaking his head "no", and refusing to open his mouth. I think it tasted just fine, but it was cold. Perhaps next time I should heat it up. I CAN'T have him not like squash like his dad. I'll be ruined. The doc says to just try it again because he is probably just not used to it. It is rather ORANGE. Maybe he just isn't into orange things.

Baby + Moving + Traveling + Sleep-deprivation = Unhappiness

Yeah, so I can't wait to get moved into our final destination home next week. I am so very sick and tired of moving from place to place, getting baby onto some semblance of a sleep schedule just to pick up and move again. Don't get me wrong, I loved visiting with everyone we got to see over the course of the last few months, but it can get pretty harry when you don't have a permanent home to come back to and you have a 6-month-old in tow. We ended up going to the urgent care today because the little one just wouldn't get happy. No doubt nothing was wrong except that he has crazy parents - one that didn't do well with the time-zone change from China (doesn't speed jet-lag recovery to have baby wake-up to feed right around the time you'd normally be having lunch) and the other who fully dreaded the return to the single-room hotel for another week and a half. The good ol' Doc said just to stick it out - grin and bear it - basically: "what'd you think would happen when you move across country and throw in a trip to Europe in there?"

In the meantime, anyone have tips on how to sleep in one room when one of your roommates likes to cry a lot? Perhaps some of you have had experiences like this while in college when there was a particularly harsh break-up occurring with one of your roommates? My son's break-up is with his cousins and his aunt, whom he got to meet for the first time last week. He enjoyed his time with them immensily, besides a high fever that knocked him out for a couple of days. For the majority of the visit, he would sit there calmly and watch his cousin color or play hunting on the computer, or giggle and smile when all three cousins came to greet him in the morning, or pat him on the head as a greeting when they came home from school. He was on his best behavior when we all went out hiking in the mountains and he got to see the changing leaves from his mommy's shoulders. His cousins seemed to like him, too, as one said that I could go home the next day, but not the baby, because he was "just too cute". Ha!

This mommy needs to get to bed now since I have another night and early morning to tackle with my little one. I would like to do it with a few minutes of sleep under my belt, perhaps accummulating into hours, if I'm lucky. :)

Getting to Italy with a 5 month old

Just after having our apartment packed up, we left for Italy for 10 days with our just-under 5 month old son. I wasn't so sure about doing this whole "fly-across-the-ocean" and changing 6 time zones for fun, but I do really love Italy and agreed that our family needed a vacation before our big move West. Unfortunately this meant that when we returned, we would be making the transition from 9 time zones, rather than just 6, but I was told to worry about that later. In Italy, we would be greeted by my husband's grandparents, great aunt, and cousins. His mother would be joining us in a day or two and then flying back with us on the same cross-ocean flight. The timezones would be tough, but then with four babysitters on hand, we would hopefully be able to do some hiking and get some R & R over the next week or so.

Our flight to Amsterdam went without a problem. It was shortly after the terrorist alert in Britian, so we weren't allowed to bring any liquids on the plane; however, my husband was able to fill a water bottle as soon as we were boarded. It could have been a much longer trip for this breast-feeding mother, otherwise! Our son smiled at everyone on board and was generally happy or spleeping throughout the flight. He made it through our exchange in Amsterdam by waking up and checking out all the people and flashing lights and then passed out on our flight to Munich. By the time we obtained our car at the airport in Munich, about to start on our way down to Italy, my husband and I had bloodshot eyes, matted hair, and itchy throats from the smoke in the airport waiting rooms. We still had 4 hours of driving to do to get to his grandparents' villa in Northern Italy. Ugh!

Luckily our son slept the whole way. What that meant for the following evening wasn't so clear, but it did make the drive down much easier. We had to make a pit-stop for chocolate in order to stay awake the whole drive ourselves. I must admit I got in a few snores, but the curvy mountain driving and the fact that my husband believes in enjoying a faster speed-limit to its fullest, kept my eyes open a lot longer than I wanted them to be.

We arrived a little sooner than the grandparents expected, due to my husband's speedy driving, and sat down to a large meal. It was to be a week of large meals, because that is how the Italians to things!

Moving Company doesn't give you much notice

The movers were supposed to come on Friday and pack and load our apartment. Sometime between when the analyzer guy came to record how much stuff we had to pack and the movers were supposed to come to pack, they decided it would take more than one day to do the whole job. I'm sure they determined this earlier than they told us: at 3pm on Wednesday afternoon they told us they were coming the next morning between 8am and 10am. What?!?!?!?!?
This really shouldn't have been as big a deal as it was because our friends and my father-in-law had been over on Saturday to watch our 4 month old and allow us to get a good chunk of the cleaning and pre-packing accomplished. Unfortunately, I came down with a nasty cold and spent those lovely hours doing pretty much nothing, except I think I did get our laundry washed. I was feeling a little better by the time Wednesday afternoon rolled around, but we could definitely have used that extra day to finish up our packing.
So we managed to finish up around 2am Wednesday night, just randomly throwing things into the "early-out" pile and hoping we didn't forget anything to include for our trip to Italy which we were leaving for in a few days.