Blame the Sleep Deprivation

Parenting a toddler has its challenges, and I'm not minimizing them, but it is so much easier now than it was around this time last year. Around this time last year, I decided to take Ben on a road trip to visit friends in Philadelphia, DC, Charlottesville, DC again, and New Jersey. It was going to take nearly two weeks. In my mind, if I didn't embark on this insane journey with him, I would never go anywhere or see anyone again. At the time, he was sleeping three or four hours at a stretch and was a fairly typically mercurial four-month-old. We got as far as Philadelphia, and he woke up and needed to be nursed back down often enough overnight that I knew I'd never make it on that kind of crappy sleep, and it was much better to turn back while still mostly functional than press on and get farther from home before having to make the same decision.

And that was fine. I missed seeing the other people, but what mattered was that I'd made the attempt. But what's significant when I look back on it is that I'm sure I really didn't grasp that Ben would grow out of that sleep insanity, that in a year he'd be relatively easy to travel with, that even if I didn't take him on road trips as an infant, he'd eventually be ok with travel just by virtue of being a little kid instead of a baby. Not that travel with a little kid doesn't have its own issues.

What I'm getting at (not very cogently) is that it's kind of astounding how blind I was as the parent of a newborn to the notion that infancy would, you know, end. That no matter how crazy it was, it couldn't possibly go on forever. Part of it, I'm sure, was the lack of sleep. But part of it, too, was just the degree to which having a baby spins your head around. Everything is different and crazy and has new rules -- it's no wonder that it's so hard to see clearly what the new progression will be.

I remember saying on several occasions that I couldn't believe, having gone through this once, that anyone ever has a second child. Andy used to vow (only maybe 98% seriously) that Ben would be an only child. And you can blame the sleep deprivation for our inability to form memories back then, because now the horror is a lot fuzzier, but now the idea isn't so terrible.

I wonder how many second children are conceived soon after the first child starts sleeping through the night.

(I'm not trying to be coy or anything. We do plan to have another baby. I'm being a little goofy about not wanting to be vastly pregnant in the summer, though, so we're waiting a bit.)

Solo-Parent Road Trip

We're just back from a whirlwind trip to Charlottesville for C's triplets' first birthday, with overnight visits in DC and Philadelphia on either end. The "we" in this case is me and Ben, no Andy, and solo-parent road-tripping was surprisingly easy. And by "easy," of course I mean "I didn't even cry once."

The thing that makes it doable is that the kid will sleep in his travel crib in strange places. For a while, that was not the case, and every trip out of town meant each night stacked up the sleeplessness. Now that he sleeps -- and I sleep -- all things are possible.

Another thing that makes it doable is understanding and helpful friends who don't roll their eyes at our arrival with armloads of gear and crap, who make room and help carry and let their schedules work around us a little. You expect it to some degree from other people with babies (or whose kids were babies in recent memory), but it's a wonderful gift from the unbabied.

What makes it fun is that he's a pretty gregarious and outgoing little dude. He genuinely enjoys interacting with people, making faces and getting reactions, so that he's both happy and the source of happiness in others. Rest stops on the Jersey Turnpike, for instance, are not generally a highlight of anybody's travel, but when you walk in hand-in-hand with a grinning toddler who likes to wave his fat little arm at everybody, it can be something of a treat.

I wish I were one of those people who could travel with a toddler and one overnight bag, but I'm just not, and I've made my peace with it.

- clothing and bathroom stuff bag
- diaper bag
- bag of toys
- bag of food, snacks, sippies, plates, and bibs*
- heavy-as-hell bag of travel crib
- Ikea plastic-canvas bag of booster seat and tray
- bag of dvd player and dvds
- stroller

And, sure, I could consolidate some of those bags, but what does it get me to put the toys in the food bag except hassle when I want to carry one and not the other? As it is, I had to shuffle a bunch of stuff to take just the minimal food and diaper gear when we took public transportation into Center City for dinner, since I wasn't about to lug the kid, the stroller, my handbag, and two other large bags up and down subway stairs.

Anyway. Doing this stuff on my own is mostly fine. I'm just organized enough, and just patient enough (though the experimental, let's-push-Mom's-buttons-'cause-I'm-bored shrieking on the Beltway did make me lose my mind briefly), and I like driving, and I like my kid. But it does give me profound respect for single parents of tiny people. Other people can give you help and respite, but not like a co-parent can. I had a wonderful time (and so did Ben), but it sure is nice to be back here where I don't have to change all the diapers.


* I realized after posting that actually I had another food bag, too: a cooler bag with fridge stuff in it. I also had a bag of knitting, but I can hardly blame that on Ben.

Road Trip

We spent Ben's first birthday with Andy's folks in Wisconsin, which means that we spent four very long days (12 hours, give or take) on the road with a 12-month-old. And it went about as well as four 12-hour days in the car with a 12-month-old could possibly go, I must say.

On the advice of friends, we bought a portable dvd player and a dohickey to hang it from the front seats, and when it came time to pull out the big guns, I have never been so glad to kiss goodbye my formerly strong opinion that videos in cars are one of the things wrong with Kids Today. Without the magic trance-inducer, we'd have to have added another day to the trip each way, without a doubt. (Our dvds, in case you were dying to know, were They Might Be Giants' ABCs and 123s, and Yo Gabba Gabba.)

The other sine qua non of the trip was stopping for actual meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's tough to abandon a driving lifetime of honed road-trip tactics (the drive-through, the you-pee-while-I-get-gas, the lap snacks rather than meals), and it's really tough to feel that hour or hour and a half tick by, knowing that every minute is another minute you're going to be stuck in the car at the other end. But babies aren't roadtrippers, and the kid needed to stretch his baby legs and look at the crap on the walls of the Cracker Barrel instead of the back of a headrest for a while. And I do recommend Cracker Barrel. The vegetables are awful, but the rest of the menu is very tasty and very inexpensive. I can't think of another chain that's as ubiquitous and reliable without being also terrible or overpriced.

The real lesson of the trip, though, is don't take a baby on an eleven-hundred-mile road trip if you can possibly avoid it. Plane travel has its pitfalls and problems -- the expense springs to mind, along with the hell of being the one responsible for the crying baby making everyone else unhappy -- but I think it still might beat four 12-hour days in the car. Best of all, of course, is when it's their turn to come to you.