Adventures in Parenting

Simon is four months old today--look how much he's grown!
(12 days on the left, 4 months on the right)

Over the past four months, the everyday adventures in parenting (coping with screaming baby, finding a place to change a diaper without offending too many people, breastfeeding in public, etc.) have become pretty routine for us. It now takes more unusual circumstances for us to consider something to have been an adventure. Lucky me though, I recently had two such adventures...

1. Tornado Drill: Simon's first tornado drill while I was on campus getting some work done at the coffee shop (see Jess abandoning her own bag, coffee, etc. to wheel sleeping baby in stroller into huge crowd of students in the lower level, because she doesn't have enough hands to grab everything and the people doing the herding of students are being rather adamant that I leave, right now!...of course, I cheated and took the elevator while no one was looking because, really, do you want me to make the baby scream by taking him out of the stroller to carry down the stairs, when we all know this is just a drill?)
   
   
2. Traffic Jam: The interstate was closed right about at our exit, due to an accident. I, driving home from the Cities with Simon, did not know this, of course. So there's about a 6-mile gap between our exit and the one before, and not knowing to exit at the one before, instead Simon and I took about an hour and a half to travel those 6 miles to get to our exit. Generally Simon sleeps in the car, which is great...but he only sleeps if the car is moving, so about 3 or 4 minutes into the stopped traffic, he woke up, screaming (of course). About 10 minutes later it was clear to me that the traffic was not going to clear up anytime soon, so we pulled off onto the shoulder while I fed him in the backseat, then strapped him back in and rejoined the traffic. To give you an idea of the frustratingly slow pace of vehicles: in the entire time it took me to pull off, feed Simon, strap him back into his seat and pull back into the lane (probably 15-20 minutes), the school bus I had been right in front of had moved a total of about 5 truck-lengths ahead. (Strapping Simon back in to the carseat led to more screaming, of course, but at least now it was not the intense "I'm hungry!" scream, just an intermittent "I don't like my carseat when no one is entertaining me and I'm bored back here!" scream, which is somewhat easier to tolerate.) I was just glad we didn't run out of gas!

So these past four months and related parenting adventures have earned me a new holiday: Mother's Day! Officially its still over a week away, but we celebrated early because Andy has some work stuff he has to do on actual Mother's Day. Here we are at the waffle bar, the new mom on her first mother's day, and baby, who helped us celebrate by sleeping and otherwise being generally well-behaved while Mom and Dad went out for waffles!

first Mother's Day