What goes around comes around

I've been carrying the girl in a sling since she was born. I've always found it a rather sweet way to transport the child. It's a little like a long extended hug, or at least it was when she was very young. Now she tends to be much more active, and will often flip through a book while attached (often swatting my nose or adams apple when turning the pages).

I have found myself planting a kiss on the top of her head at random moments when carrying her in the sling. I'd be just standing or walking around, and, well, why not? Until recently I never really considered if it she liked it or not.

Now, I've been carrying her on my shoulders on occasion. If we're walking around and she's out of the sling, it's sometimes easier to carry her that way than to walk alongside her – given how easily she can be distracted by, well, everything. The past few times she's been on my shoulders, she's occasionally bent down and planted a kiss on the top of my head. I nearly melted the first time she did that. She'll also sometimes swing her head round till she caches my eye and smiles at me.

I think she likes it.

On a similar note, I do wonder how long I can/should be carrying her in the sling. She can walk just fine now, though I'd not be willing to walk down Oxford Street with her this time of year. But I do find that one advantage of babies transported in prams, is that their parents will take them out at any time and they can walk alongside them, or play while waiting in a queue and so on. The sling is a bit of a pain to take her out and put her back in, so I only do it if I'll be a place for a while. I sometimes feel that keeping her in the sling is stunting her ability to deal with the world around her.

I also wonder how big she should get before it's too troublesome to carry her. At this point I already have RSI in one shoulder from picking her up (and she's small for her age), and if I carry her for too many hours in a day, it does start to hurt. How long can I keep carrying her before it starts to be a bad idea for me? And will this happen before she's ready to walk everywhere? And if so, how will we transport her around? I'm not going to start using a pram.

Now we are cruising

The little one started crawling and standing at around the same time, back in Feb. Her crawling is getting much better. She was flopping one hesitant hand on the floor at a time. Now she'll move from room to hallway – where she'll get distracted by something and stay for a while.

She can also now stand, but only holding on to something. So she'll pull herself up on a baby gate, chair, table or whatever she can find, and then just stand for ages. She's taken to bending down while holding on to pick up a toy. It's cute – she bends over like an old lady. Weird symmetry there.

She's also trying very hard to stand without holding on to anything. But she ends up just doing a downward facing dog. I suspect standing on her own will be coming quite soon.

She's cruising to the extent that she'll hold on to something and slowly shuffle down the length of it to get where she wants to be. For those non-baby people reading this, cruising means just that – walking by holding on to something and moving along it.

She likes standing. She seems to really like it, and will pull herself up whenever she can. All. The. Time. Especially when she's upset. It seems to be her way of self-soothing.
Which is quite annoying, since a child learning to self sooth is the big hurdle on the way to getting them to fall asleep on their own. And clearly, she's not going to fall asleep while standing, holding on to the side of a cot. So easy sleeping is not in the cards for us anytime soon. In fact, I can hear the wife downstairs right now trying to sing her to sleep. I'm always torn, if I go down there to try to help, seeing me may wake the girl. Or maybe tag-teaming the lulling may help. It's really hard to tell how the wee one's going to react.

As an aside, I've not posted for ages and ages. I've been ill with complications and now springtime allergies. The wife was ill. The child was ill. I'd had nothing to write about except how unpleasant a family of snot and fever was. And I've done that enough times that I figured a break was in order. I read a book. And ate a lot of ice cream.

On a final note, I finally got the cheque from Virgin Atlantic for the damage they did to the pram on our flight to the States when she was 3 months old. She was 7 months old when we got the cheque. Again, not impressed.

Now we fly

Just over a month ago, we took the child on her first intercontinental plane trip. We went to see her grandparents, aunts and uncle in the US. Planning this journey was a lot of work. I've travelled a lot, so at this point I've got it down to an art. At least if it's just me, or just me and L. No need to plan how to get to the airport, or anything. Just set out on autopilot and don't think till we hit the destination.

This time we had to actually plan. In great detail. How do we feed and change her on the flight? How many changes of clothes do we need to bring? How many just for travelling. How do we get her and the pram to the airport with our luggage? Do we need the pram? How does security work? How do we carry her around the airport? How will she deal with the air pressure changes on takeoff and landing? What do we do if she fusses? How do we get from the airport at our destination? Our birth plan wasn't this complicated.

Or expensive. We ended up using minicabs for the London-side travel, and a rental car in the US.

The minicab picking us up at home arrived 45 minutes early since they wanted to fit in an extra fare that morning (or, as they said, traffic). We weren't done packing so all we could do was have them wait. We barely squeezed our luggage plus the folded pram in the car. So now we know how much we can take with us an fit in a reasonable sized minicab.

Rather than detailing the whole adventure, I'll just recount the interesting bits.

The wee one had about as much luggage for just herself as we did for both L and I combined. Or more for her, if you include the pram.

All the airport and airplane staff cooed over the child. Even UK immigration said awww. Only Dulles security were heartless and mean. More on that later.

We flew Virgin Atlantic, which had good parts and bad parts. The seating on the plane over was lovely. It was one of their newer planes. The "sky cot" was easy to get the kid into and out of. She even slept in it a little. We were sat next to the double-sized loo which had a good sized changing table. We had row of 5 to ourselves.

The real down side was Virgin breaking our pram. Two of the wheels just snapped off. They said they'd pay us back for the repairs, but I'm still following that up with them. Not at all impressed. Especially with their customer service: Here's all your paperwork, phone the number at the end to make the arrangements. When we got to our destination, only then did we notice there was no number in the paperwork. Or on the web site. Or anywhere. Not impressed.

They also appear to have a policy of taking 3 weeks to respond to any communication. This is not sarcasm. This is their actual policy.

Anyways, once we arrived, we got to spend some quality family time plus occasional visits to friends in the area. The little one behaved quite well through most of our social events. In fact, we benefited from her jet lag since she was not able to get to sleep at a reasonable time, instead of after midnight.

My first time alone together with the wife after the child was born was when we left her, with the mother-in-law and a bottle of breastmilk, while we went off to renew the wife's drivers license. Then shopping at Target.

Sounds romantic, doesn't it?

The worst trouble we had was car rides. The babe would sometimes just hate them. That was yet another thing which was the opposite of what we were led to believe. About 1/3 of all drives had her needing consolation at some point. Either I had to reach to the back seat and try to calm her down, or, I would just sit next to her for the duration of the drive.

We ended up not using the pram much at all – even after we got the replacement parts. It was car seat for the drive, then the sling at the other end. I did end up getting a number of amused my god, there's a baby in there when people noticed that the bump on my chest was a cute little tiny person rather than too many pies.

Flying back the UK was less pleasant than leaving the UK. Dulles has dropped in my opinion to a strip mall with airplanes. There are no changing tables at the airport. None. The family restrooms are just large restrooms with a single toilet and a sink. I had to change her on the floor. I still cannot believe it's that bad.

Security made things worse. They were nice and cooed over the babe up until the metal detectors. At that point they made us dismantle the pram, on top of all the various take off shoes, take out laptops, etc etc they usually make people do. Then when madly putting the pram and luggage back together, with just one shoe on between us, all while trying to keep the child calm, then they told us to vacate the secure area. Really. That actually happened.

I swear, if I didn't have to return to DC, that would be enough to convince me to just give up and never go there again. It's not that nice a place to warrant that sort of trouble. (Then again, arrival wasn't so bad, maybe next time I'll try leaving from another city)

The plane ride back to the UK was innocuous. The plane itself was not as new, so the facilities were less nice, but certainly passable. The cot did look like it was slept in more times than I care to imagine. This time Virgin didn't break any of our stuff, which was a bonus. Passport control was a breeze. There was sizeable queue, but they herded us to a new queue with no one ahead of us. We were stamped in by a officer in training, who clearly had not gone through her cynic training yet. She cooed the most of any public official yet over the child. That made for a nice welcome home.

I'm stopping the story here so I end on a high note