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March 1, 2004
6.5 Months
It has been a heck of a couple of weeks here, so I will just get right to it all. This is a giant entry, just because of what all has happened, so get ready to settle down for a long haul! :-)
We are really getting into gear about the move, and on Tuesday our minivan, Homer the Odyssey (great name, huh?) was shipped off. Or, rather, it was picked up to be shipped off tomorrow. We had to ship it this early so that we could have it almost as soon as we arrive in our new city. The reason this is so important? Well, besides with dealing with the whole hassle of renting a car large enough for Iain's stroller and car seat in a semi-strange city, we have Brook to contend with as well, and Simon (I think I've mentioned this before) has a very difficult time fitting into cars because his body is so tall that he literally has to bend his neck to fit his head under the roof, and usually looks out to the bottom edge of the roof - where it meets the windsheild. This means that he can't see out the windsheild, he's too tall. So, we wanted to have our van, and very soon after our arrival.
Our secondary concern was that Iain is too long for his baby car carrier, and has been in the rear-facing booster seat since mid-December. And I didn't want him to be in the carrier as much as possible, so this was the best solution. We rented a car and picked it up on Monday night so that we would have it before the van was gone, and hooked up Iain's old car base into the back seat. We will use it for the plane trip, as we made sure to purchase three seats for us all. I want him in his car seat for take-offs and landings, and don't want to take the chance that a seat won't be available. So, anyway, we will have the rental car until we leave, and then rent one again for the first day we are in the new city so that we can buy grocieries, and then I will have the van shortly thereafter.
The third concern was that when we arrive, I have literally a million decisions to make on the house, and have to be able to drive there, meet the builder, go to all the companies that he is picking up materials from and chose things, as well as doing other things like buying items that we will need in the basement suite. Whew! So, I need my van.
So, on Monday, we spent almost the entire day packing it up with stuff, taking it to the car wash so that it was clean. They want it clean so that the inspection that they do prior to taking possession of it reveals all of the potential nicks and dings. They mark those all down and we sign that it is correct etc. and so they don't have any liability for the existing wear and tear on the vehicle. We decided to pack Iain's MegaSaucer, so that while I won't have it available to distract Iain while I am pumping before we move, we should have it fairly soon after we move. We also packed a ton of clothes for Simon, Iain and I, so that our load will be somewhat reduced when we have all of our baggage on the plane. We also ended up packing some of the Kid's stuff, like Scarlett's basket and hard kennel, we bought a soft one for her to travel with us on board the plane, and Brook's mat, so that she has something familiar when we are in the unfamiliar basement suite for the month. The shipping company won't take responsibility for any personal items left in the vehicle, but nothing of value is in there, so I think we'll be okay. Besides, they drive in into a container, it is shipped, drive it onto a truck, driven down to our city and delivered to me. What can happen to it? Or... should I even jinx myself that? :-) The fellow came by to pick it up and off our minivan went... It really feels like we're moving now. Really feels like it.
One last thing about vehicles before I will leave all this well enough alone. The rental car stinks. I mean to the olfactory (sp?) senses. The last person, or some previous person, smoked in it as if they were going to die the next day, and because the entire car is fabric, including the roof, it just soaked up all those fumes and is releasing them now. It smells SO strongly that the first day we were in it we had the windows down, even though Iain was in the back with us. We simply couldn't deal with the fumes. And when we got home, I noticed that my CLOTHES smelled like smoke too. Isn't that disgusting? So, Simon attemted to remedy the situation by using an entire bottle of President's Choice "Febreeze" to no avail. Still stunk :-( We are leaving all the windows down when we're not in it, and it has stunk up our garage now too. It sucks. Oh well, we're not really doing much out this week, so we'll survive.
A couple of days after Iain's 6 Month Birthday, we were hit by a Nor'Easter. The Mother of all Nor'Easter's too. It started on Thursday morning, and raged on until Friday. I am sure that some of you will have heard of all the ruckus it caused, the 95 cm of snow in 24 hours, the 125km/hr winds, the zero visibiltiy, the province-wide state of emergency, city-wide curfews... It was truly an incredible experience to go through. We just watched, and watched, and watched as the storm continued and continued. We live on a cul-de-sac, and there were many times when I could literally barely see across to the houses that face us. And it's not like it is a really big cul-de-sac. The wind was blowing the snow horizontally, and anything in it's way was creating drifts. Because of the way that the houses are oriented to the street, it was really amazing to see that some houses had absolutely no snow on their entire driveway, whereas others, like ours, was utterly filled with snow. Simon went out twice during the day, the only one among all the residents, to clear our driveway. While this may seem silly, given that it was just going to continue to snow, would you like to shovel 5 vertical feet at once, or do several jobs of slightly less height? It is rather disheartening to open your garage door to a literal wall of snow, and we were delighted when it was all over and done with that our wall was significantly lower than others in the neighbourhood, who had not done shovelling while the storm was in action.
One of the funny things that happened during the storm was that one of our neighbours is the Atlantic correspondent to the national news station. We watched him that morning when the storm was just in it's infancy, trying to get out of his driveway and down the street. The funny thing? He owned a Grand Cherokee, that's right, a 4 WD vehicle. The funnier thing? He didn't have a single clue how to operate it and clearly didn't have it in 4 WD, because his back end, we just watched, fishtaled back and forth, back and forth, just spinning away. It really had us in fits of laughter. He finally got it back onto his driveway after giving up on his attempt to drive down the street (which had, by the way, only about a foot of snow by then). A little while later, I watched the national morning news program consult him on what the storm was doing to the region, so he obviously made it to the news station somehow. Perhaps with someone who could drive? Silly man. Oh, and THEN, on nationally broadcasted news, he said that he owned a SUV, and even HE couldn't get out of his driveway!!! If only the viewers had a newsclip of his attempt to get out. I just giggled and hooted at his owning up to the fact that he couldn't drive worth a hoot, and on national television. I suppose that I should say that we don't particularly care for these neighbours, their superiority complex drives us loony, and we don't socialize with them much as a result. So, you see why I was laughing. Simon was out shovelling at the time of that particular broadcast and when he came in I told him about it, he almost had tears in his eyes, he was laughing so hard.
At one point while Simon was shovelling us out for the second time, a plow attempted to come up our street. You have to understand the shape of our street to comprehend the rest of this event. Our street is like an "L" where the bulb of the cul-de-sac is on the long end of the "L" and the corner is actually a fairly steep hill at the same time. So, Simon watche the plow attempt to come up the hill and corner with his blade down, seven times. He then gave up, and our hopes of possibly being plowed out before Sunday were absolutely dashed. You see, we are rated as a secondary residential street, despite the fact that for square foot, we are one of the highest property tax-paying neighbourhoods in all of the city. Our houses are valued very high, and we are very densely located. Anyway, we usually don't get cleared until hours and hours after the storm has left the region. So, we were really looking at Sunday for when we could be clear :-(
We awoke on Friday morning to a calm, sunny day. A beautiful winter day. If not for the 5.5 feet of snow filling our ENTIRE cul-de-sac, and street. Simon crawled out into the highest part of the... uhm... snowbank? and measured using a 2x4 that we had. The neighbours were out en force that morning, that afternoon etc. Most of them had their driveways cleared by the afternoon, but what was the point when there was just a wall at the end of it? :-) Where the plow had come on Thursday there was less snow and one of the residents had a snow blower right at that point of the street, and as usual, blew the snow, not onto their side yards, but out onto the street, just making it harder for whenever the plow would eventually arrive. This is very usual behaviour for this house, they always do it, and it just makes a huge mess of things when the plow comes by, because the street is REALLY narrow from all this extra snow. But no matter, we won't have to deal with it anymore, we're MOVING!!
Speaking of moving. A-hem. We were starting to get a little nervous that the packers wouldn't be able to get to the house to pack. And then it wouldn't be packed on time. And we might not be able to get the moving van up to the house, which would make us not move on time. And we were leaving on Friday, the packers would be there Monday and Tuesday, and the movers on Wednesday. That was really NOT that much time to play around with. And Simon started work on the following Monday. Yikes!
Cut to Saturday night. We were watching TV, and hear a noise. The noise? The beeping of a vehicle in reverse. Like a front-end loader vehicle. A PLOW!! It was in the lower cul-de-sac that we are able to see from our living room windows. Simon had gone to the window and when he said was it was, I literally let out a hoot and hollar of sheer delight. We were to be freed! The plow came around the corner, up the hill, working it's way over to us. He eventually cleared the cul-de-sac and street and EVERYONE'S driveways (the first time a plow had done this, ever - i.e. instead of making a gigantic pile at the end of the driveways) and took over an hour to do all of this. I went out at one point, soon after he cleared our driveway to try to give him a chocolate bar (hey, we didn't have any cookies, and he was operating heavy machinery, so no beer) but he said that he'd just eaten supper, and declined :-) Nice guy though!
So, the packers were able to come on Monday after all, and man, were they efficient! The two men packed up the entire house in about... oh, 12-14 hours, total. The only problem that we had was that I would tell on of them that an item was not to be packed because he appeared to be packing the room, only to see that later, the other fellow was in the room and the item was packed! ARGH!! So, there are many items that we are either going to have to put directly into the garbage when we unpack them because they had no intention of moving with us, or we are going to have to purchase when we arrive in the new city because we needed them. A sample are Iain's spoons, the PDA charger (darn it, darn it!), the cell phone charger (darn it, darn it, darn it!!). Also packed were my sunglasses... my set of keys for the van... Ah well, nothing we can do about it really.
On Tuesday, we were able to have a visit with our doula for Iain's birth. We hadn't been able to see her since September, she's been doing training and then the craziness of the holiday season. Oh, and she has a daughter too, so she's a single mum. Anyway, it was FABULOUS seeing her again, and she was able to have a great visit with Iain as well. We talked about a ton of stuff, one of which was the fact that I had almost 200 oz of frozen breastmilk in the freezer that we were not able to ship to our new city. It was making me almost nauseous to think about dumping all that liquid gold, but M told me about milk banks paying to ship breastmilk to the donor banks. I was able to contact one on the west coast, but because their funding has been slashed, they can no longer afford to ship the milk. The woman sounded absolutely despondent when she asked if I really had 200 oz of milk. What we're going to do is give it to M to store and when we get to the new city, I am going to try to contact other banks in the association to see if they can take the milk. If M finds someone who needs the milk in the interim, she is going to give it to them. So, there is sort of a solution for that problem then.
On Wednesday, the movers arrived bright and early and proceeded to, just as efficiently as the packers, pack up the house. The only difficult thing about all of this is arranging it so that Iain's naps don't get too disrupted. It was fine until Wednesday, but when they packed up his room... he had no where to sleep. We had had him sleeping in his play yard for the past couple of naps and nights to get him adjusted to the new environment, but it was just a dark and quiet room. So, we set up his play yard in our master walk-in closet, and it turned out to be an okay set up.
I had my last hair cut appointment scheduled at noon, as I didn't want to arrive in the new city only to find myself desperately searching for a hair stylist because my hair was driving me mad. So, we left the house in the stinky rental car, and made our way through the valleys and canyons of snow down to the salon. I was really looking forward to seeing my stylist one last time, because she is due on April 18th, and I hadn't seen her in a while, and I wanted to see how much she had grown since the last time! :-) She was delighted to see me and Iain, who has accompanied me every visit, and she has really bloomed since our last appointment. She is still tiny compared to what I was at 32/33 weeks, but she has a much longer torso, so there is much more room for her Little One to wiggle around in! Simon came in and got to meet her too, because he brought lunch.
When we arrived back home, there was almost nothing left in the house to pack. Our house had been feeling increasingly larger as the boxes piled up, but when we arrived home to nothing in any of the rooms, the house felt gigantic! And the echoes of an empty house are really strange as you are talking... The guys were all gone as of about 3:00, and we were left to our own devices. Iain went down for a nap and Simon and I set out our sleeping bags in the bedroom and read for a while. I had a nap too and we just had a quiet time for the remainder of the afternoon. We went out for dinner, of course, because we had nothing to eat the remaining food in the fridge with, and nothing to sit on. Our neighbours, the ones with the only baby girl in the Baby Group invited us over earlier in the day if we wanted, and when we got home from dinner, we went over because honestly, we didn't want to spend any more time than necessary in our empty, empty house.
A brief interlude about Iain... Uhm... How can I describe this? Okay. He's crawling. Like, moving across the room after items, returning to items after I remove him from them... The whole, entire, complete, nine yards. And, it's ALL Simon's fault. He had apparently, unbeknownst to me, had a chat last week or so with his son, that he wanted him crawling and talking by the time he started work. And so, Iain crawled. OH MY GOD. I have a baby, not yet even 6.5 months old, and he's CRAWLING. It started on Saturday and Sunday, he was making lunging movements at toys and things. On Monday, he figured out that the lunging was working. Tuesday? He was on the move. Wednesday? He had it DOWN PAT. Once again, OH MY GOD. I am terrified at my baby boy! :-) I mean, how smart does he have to be to have figured this all out so young? Honestly, I am quite scared, how am I ever going to keep up to such a smart little person?
And WHY did this have to happen the exact week we were moving, when I desperately wanted him to just sit still while I packed everything we would need for an entire month, for Simon, myself, Iain, Brook and Scarlett? *Shaking my head here.* Suffice to say then that I am the mother of an incredible, amazing baby boy. Who, I guess, isn't so baby anymore, huh? :-)
Okay, back to Wednesday night. So, we went over and chatted with our neighbours. Their daughter had already gone down for the night, and the dad was really impressed that Iain was crawling, because his baby girl was 8 months old, and not anywhere near to making such movements. The mum was also quite astonished, I am definitely going to miss her, I find myself able to talk to her more honestly than the remaining mums in the group really. It felt so decadent to be sitting on couches having adult conversation! We left them close to 10:00, and went to bed. On the floor, in sleeping bags. Iain woke up halfway through the night that night and as I was getting up, it felt like my back was literally screaming at me. I have had continual problems with my very lower back since Iain was born, and while it has been quite good lately, clearly the new sleeping situation did not do it well. It hurt so badly that it was all I could do from crying aloud when I bent over to settle Iain again. Man, it hurt.
Simon and I decided that we were NOT going to do that for Thursday night, and we stayed in a motel that night. We left the kids at home, pakced up the play yard and the things we would need for the night and stayed at a little motel nearby. We woke up that morning feeling much better and Simon left to check on the kids while I readied the room and Iain for the day.
Sideline here. It has also been very difficult to pump under these conditions. I have maintained the three pumpings a day, but mid-way through the week, when we had no furniture and I had to sit on the floor to pump, I realized that I was NOT going to be able to pump in the middle of the night in these conditions. So, we rearranged my schedule so that I pump at 7:00, 2:00 and 9:30pm or so. I am finding that this new schedule really works well. At first I was quite concerned that dropping the mid-night pump was going to drastically affect my supply, but it seems to not have dropped that much, which is great.
My best friend, her husband and daughter (who is Iain's girlfriend, they are destined to marry) came by on Friday morning for one last visit. It was so bittersweet, I am going to miss her so much, it hurts to think about it even. Through all of my troubles with breastfeeding and through pumping and parenting, she has been there 150% for Iain and I. I mean, they even looked after Iain on Valentines Day so that Simon and I could go out to the Jann Arden concert (our second date in 6 months). I mean, I literally couldn't ask for more from a friend. They even brought a Chai tea for me, and a hot chocolate for Simon, because they remembered that I like Chai tea, and Simon doesn't drink coffee. How nice is that??!!
Our neighbour with the baby girl also dropped by at the same time and she was able to meet Iain's girlfriend, the first time actually. They are similar ages too, Erin (neighbour) is 8 months, Fiona (girlfriend) is 7.5 months. We had a good, if brief visit, and they left because I had to still finish packing. Another neigbourhood mum dropped by too to say good-bye, it was really nice to have all these visits on our last morning in the city.
Finally, it was time to leave. Another friend, this one with a 1 ton truck, arrived to help take all of our stuff to the airport, and it was a good thing too, because it literally filled the truck bed, we had that much stuff. We checked in, got all sorted out and went through security. We arrived really early because of Brook and Scarlett, and Simon was paged to return to the check-in desk at one point. Brook was in the back, but it was right beside where all the baggage thumped through, so she was getting really startled from the thumps and thuds that she couldn't see. She was moving so much in her kennel that it slid off of the baggage cart, which really startled her. So, Simon was able to take her outside to the tarmac and toss some snowballs for her, a favourite game of hers, and she calmed down a bit after that. When the early boarding page came through though, you should have SEEN the line up! Everybody and their dogs was in that line up! At least half of them were legitimate, but the others just wanted to get on the plane early. Simon went to the end of the line, and I tried to join the line pretty close to the start, when a flight attendent motioned to me to come forward (bless her heart). When Simon tried to join me, the teenager and his mum who were the next in line behind me, tried to block him! Can you believe this? How rude. Yeah, you really need extra time to board, because you have young children. Right. Anyway, we got settled, strapped Iain's carrier into the seat that we bought for him and we were off!
The trip was good, we transferred planes and had to get off at one point, which was difficult because of all the stuff we had, stroller, car seat, Iain, Scarlett in a kennel, diaper bag, purse, pump backpack and a little roller suitcase too. Whew! The flight attendents all the way through were really nice, which was great. It made the travel so much better. The only thing was that Iain had been up at 6:30 that morning, and had a half hour nap at the house, a half hour nap to the airport, and that was it. Until 9:00pm his time. So, to say that he was getting tired would be an understatement. The thing is, he is such an incredibly interested baby boy, it was just FAR too exciting to sleep. We just kept giving him milk so that he was happy. He got all of his regular bottles, plus a little here and there. Finally he went down for about an hour and a half on the plane, and I slept too, mercifully. It was a good thing that we bought three seats for the entire portion of the travel, because the second half was completely packed, and it gives me the heebee geebies to think of trying to entertain and contain Iain in just two airplane seats... It was hard enough to do and we had an entire row! LOL
I had had to use a family washroom to pump when we had arrived at the airport, which was really nasty because someone had just used it prior to me and it STANK. Gross. But, there was no where else for me to pump that had a plug. And yeah, I had batteries in my pump too, but I wasn't going to use a women's washroom, with ladies going in and out and toilets flushing. Besides, what would they have thought of the noise coming from the handicapped stall? So, I did it. And then there wasn't enough time for me to pump in the airport at the layover, so I pumped when we were up at altitude, in the plane. Simon had Iain and draped a blanket over me, and I pumped. The noise of the engine drowned out the pump, and Simon sat so that you couldn't really see what I was doing, and yeah, it was awkward, but it worked and I did it. The hardest part was that I usually compress one breast and then move to the other when the milk slows down, but I need to SEE to do that, and so I had to keep peeking and rearranging the blanket to cover myself back up. Thank goodness we were the last row in the plane, that helped too.
We had another friend of the family come to help us get into the city when we arrived. I took some luggage and Iain, and Simon took the rest of the luggage and Brook and went off to rent a SUV or minivan. We were to meet at the place we were staying at. I arrived and met the people we were renting from, they were really nice. Iain needed changing the moment we arrived and was making noise, but all the lady said was that he must be exhausted. I was invited upstairs to have some tea (or other beverage, which I declined upon fear of passing out on the spot). Simon arrived and it wasn't in a SUV. Or minivan. Instead, he was in a HUGE truck. And I am serious, it literally TOWERED over other vehicles, like, oh, the Ford Excursion and Hummer. And I know this because when we went out on Saturday to grocery shop, we passed these vehicles, and they were shorter than us! It was too funny.
We had to return the vehicle on Saturday, and managed to get most of the necessary groceries and sundry goods to last us until Friday, when we should get our van. Oh, our precious, precious van. We went out for a walk on Sunday to a family friend's house where some of my milk was stored, and it was a really nice walk. Simon starts work on Monday, his first time at a "job" since before we moved to our LAST city. He's been a graduate student since then, so it was his own timetable. The basement suite is going to work out fine. We have a fully functioning kitchen, a washer and dryer (thank heavens, lord knows Iain generates a ridiculous amout of laundry) and a TV, with cable. The only thing we don't have is a land line... So, cell phone it is for us. Going to be expensive, that's for sure.
So, that is where we stand. It's Monday morning and for the first time in six and a half months, Simon isn't here with Iain and I. It feels strange. It feels lonely. I mean, it was probably a lot harder than it could have been if Simon had a job in, say, October. Partially because of the stress of us not having a job, but also because we weren't getting a break from each other. And dealing with all of the issues that came up with Iain was definitely the hardest test on our relationship that has come to pass so far. But still, I miss my best friend :-(
**Talk to Me**
Did you have to make a large move when your baby was young (or one of your babies) and how did it go for you? Did you have to live in a temporary space before moving into the permanent place like us?
When did your baby start to make forward crawling movements? When did they start to walk?
When did your husband go back to work, and how did it make you feel when he did, particularly if he took an extended absence to be with you and the baby?
Namaste, Laura and Iain
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