Getting Into the Swing of Things

First trip to the beach at 9 days old.

The Kid will be 6 weeks old tomorrow, and we’ve been slowly getting used to the chaos of having a  newborn running our lives for us. He’s a pretty mellow kid most of the time, and we’ve been able to take him on a lot of short walks in local woods and out along the ocean. He sleeps through most of these little trips, and it seems almost silly to drive over and load up the carrier just to have him sleep someplace new. I’m hoping that he hears the sounds of the ocean and woods in his sleep, and when he can stay awake long enough, they will seem familiar, though he won’t know why.

This weekend we will be heading out for our first camping trip. I’m a little nervous, but not because we are doing anything too terribly difficult. We will be car camping at a place we’ve been to a hundred times, with other families at the same site, and are planning to do a few short hikes in familiar territory. The two things freaking me out a bit are that he’ll cry all night long and wake everyone in the campground up, or that he’ll get too cold, especially since we can’t put him in a sleeping bag.

This camping trip was also supposed to be the debut of my brilliant plan to make the tent a familiar place for the Kid. We bought a Kidco Peapod Travel Bed, which is basically a tiny little tent that you can set up for babies to nap in…kind of a much more flexible and lightweight alternative to a pack-n-play. The idea was to get him used to sleeping in the Peapod, then put the Peapod into our regular tent and presto—-strange tent becomes a familiar sleeping place and the Kid’s routine is maintained, all while we make a  place for him to sleep in the tent where he be safe from having to snuggle with a stinky dog . Unfortunately,  he hates it. To be fair, he hates sleeping anywhere that’s more than 6 inches away from a parent, so I still think my plan has merit. It just might take him a little longer to get into the swing of things. We’ll see how the weekend goes…

This is the model we got, but not our baby...image from Amazon.com