david had 3 vacation weeks this year. he ended up having nearly all of may off, the way the calendar worked out after the other drivers got their vacation weeks. we normally get vacation weeks in the months other drivers don't want, like march or february, so we were looking forward to some good weather while vacationing. we planned to go to montana to see david's parents, camping in moab, and my mom come for a visit. we were excited for the month of may!
ok, so vacation #1: montana. we planned to drive up on friday and come back on monday. the more i thought about it, i wanted to break up the driving and do half of the 13 hour drive on thursday, and finish the drive on friday. that's a long drive for two adults, and there was no way pace would be able to do a 13 hour drive in one day. david wasn't interested in staying overnight in a hotel, so he wanted to just see how it would go.
i woke up friday morning around 3am to feed pace, and ended up staying up to finish packing and get stuff ready for david to load into the car. pace is an early riser--he's up for the day usually by 6am. we thought if we got on the road by 4, we'd have at least 2 hours of driving with a sleeping baby. as things go, we didn't get on the road until 5am, and pace had woken up as we were getting out the door. we drove for about 30-45 minutes and pace started getting fussy. we drove for another 30-45 minutes and stopped so we could feed pace. he sort of snacked, we walked around to calm him down, and back in the car.
he immediately started screaming as soon as we buckled him in the car seat. from slc until pocatello, we drove with a screaming baby. i sat in the back with him, singing songs, playing with toys, trying to feed him...but by the end, i was frustrated and in tears myself, not able to just pull my little boy out of the carseat and hold him until he calmed down. pace is super sensitive. if someone around him is giving off unsettling vibes, he'll pick up on it and give a meltdown himself. i'm sure i was part of the trigger that set him off--i was just so frustrated and upset, and the more he cried, the more i cried. the other trigger, looking back, is that pace was confined during the time he's used to being up and active. he's a morning person, and the first thing he does when he gets up is jump around and play for at least an hour. we thought it'd be easier to be on the road early, but it was actually harder for him to be strapped in a carseat, sitting still.
we stopped in a rest area outside pocatello and david called his parents. they were so flexible and forgiving--they told us to just turn right around and go home, that it was ok that pace wasn't able to travel yet. as soon as we told pace we were turning around and going home, he promptly stopped crying, settled into his carseat, and fell asleep. he slept until we were outside of slc, woke up, and started fussing again. it was a long 45 minutes to orem.
so...vacation #1 down the drain. we spent david's first week at home. he got a few good bike rides in, and got to spend some good quality time with pace.
vacation #2: we were going to go camping in moab with some friends. were being the operative word. the whole second week david was home ended up being about 40 degrees and raining/snowing all week long. we called down to the ranger stations in canyonlands national park, where the guys were planning on riding white rim, and they said it had been raining down there all week, too, and the river was flooding so bad they had closed the entire west half of the trail. we decided to postpone the camping trip 2 weeks out, thinking we'd see better weather the first week of june.
instead of sunny moab, we stayed inside all day every day and looked forlornly out our window at this:
and this:
and more of this:
here's what timp looked like once the clouds lifted. it's been so cold this year--our spring was more like november/december. there is so much snow on the mountains, and there has been so much rain, everyone's worried about flooding once it does warm up.
No comments:
Post a Comment