Car trips

As any parent will tell you "traveling" has a whole new mean when you travel with little ones. This weekend we drove four hours to see my best friend and her family for her babies' first birthday. We were excited to see them. They make it easy when we are there- we share baby stuff and baby food. They are such good hosts and they set up a pack and play for Seren, etc. So it is a piece of cake when you get there.

It is just the getting there.

Seren has outgrown sleeping in the car.

We had her in the infant seat and rearfacing until she was 15 months at which point she really outgrew the seat. It used to be that she'd zonk out as soon as she got in her seat. But that is not true anymore.

In the eight hours of driving, four on Saturday and four on Sunday, Seren slept for 58 minutes total despite the fact that we were driving DURING nap time on Sunday. 23 minutes going up and 35 min on Sunday.

The rest of the time, I was the human muppet.

Most people who know me know that I am a muppet most of the time anyway. But as a parent, my tendency to sing and dance and act goofy is taken to a whole new level. The challenge is keeping it up. For about half of the trips, I pretended to be the voice of a koala bear puppet. Seren looked to just sit and chat with Koala. Which is fine and good. Except that Mom was getting just *slightly* tired of using my voice at such a high octave.

The other half of the trip, I was "Mom, the toy distributor". I had a big bag of specially selected toys. The more 'unusual' to Seren, the better. With each toy that emerged, I hoped to 'buy' five-ten minutes of entertainment. I got nervous when I looked down and saw that the bag was nearly empty. The last toy.

The ironic thing was that after all of this entertaining which included puppet voices, and singing, she slept like a rock during Monday. So much so that Sam had to rock her awake during an impromptu nap. She fell asleep in the car (maybe because I wasn't with her singing and dancing?), he carried her out of the car, up a flight of stairs, laid her on the floor, cleaned her room, got the camera, took a picture, and moved her legs and she was still asleep. After lunch, she proceeded to sleep another 3 hours.

Wonders never cease.

Anyone else's kids not sleep in the car anymore?