Week 5: Family Travels

Luke and I have pretty much been shut-ins for the past 5 weeks. Basically, it's hard to get out of the house when your baby needs to eat every two hours and you are so sleep deprived you don't want to do anything other than lay on the couch. It's even harder to get out when you only have one car and your husband takes it to work every day. I try to take a walk with Luke either in the stroller or the Baby Bjorn every day, usually taking walks up to the grocery store or the library or the post office. But the weather has been so erratic that it isn't possible to do every day, even though I have gone out on little jaunts in the rain with him a few times just to get some fresh air. Almost all of our outings have been walking because we don't have a car during the day and because we have so many things that are within walking distance of our house, we don't really need to get in the car.
Uncle Wolfe and Luke
On Saturday, we were going to attend my sister-in-law's baby shower at my parents house in Delaware (1.5 hours each way) then on Sunday attend a birthday lunch for Marty at his parents house (1 hour each way). Before this past weekend, we'd taken Luke in the car only twice - once to BJ's and once to Babies R Us (both are 20 minute car rides) - over the course of his short life. So as we approached our weekend of lots of car travel we were feeling a little nervous. As you may remember, Ellie HATED the car. She cried and cried every time we got in the car, sometimes even for entire two hour trips. It made going anywhere in the car completely miserable. Elise has only just recently begun to be a good passenger in the car, so the idea of starting over with a baby that hates the car was terrifying. What if he cried the whole time and got Ellie to revert back to her old ways?!
Next three pics: Ellie, cousin Abby and Luke; Great Grandmom and Luke; Cousin Kamryn, Ellie and Luke
But, it turns out that we had nothing to worry about because Lucas is one of those babies that seems to love the car and is lulled to sleep! For both of our trips, he slept the entire way. On the way home from Delaware he was crying when we first got in the car but then passed out the second we hit the highway and slept the entire ride. Stuff we only dreamed about when Ellie was an infant. This makes the prospect of traveling with two children in the future so much more enjoyable!

Both of our visits were great too. A lot of my family members got to meet Luke for the first time and a lot of Marty's family got to spend some quality time with him. In addition, Ellie got to visit and play with her second cousin Kamryn and her cousin Abby, which she absolutely loved. We are eagerly awaiting the arrival of my brother and sister-in-law's baby in December, who will be a great playmate for Luke. We are hoping for a boy so that poor Luke will not be completely surrounded by females dressing him up in princess gear and the like.

On another note, Luke is doing a little better with sleeping at night - now he's going 3-4 hours between feedings at night, but still sticking to 2 hours between meals during the day. Lately he's been eating and going down around 11 or 11:30pm, then sleeping until 3 0r 4 am and then sleeping again until 6 or 7am. He's staying awake for a little longer periods of time during the day and is doing a little better with head control and focusing on faces and toys. He also seems a lot more alert when he's awake. In other big news, he started smiling this week! He has the most precious little smile with adorable dimples and everyone in the family is having fun trying to bring the smile out.