Month Nine began with a 10 hour car ride. For our first full week family vacation, we decided to split our time between some college friends in Myrtle Beach and family in Carolina Beach. But before that, our first stop was Raleigh. We wanted to split up our ride because we weren't sure if Lily would be able to handle a 12 hours in the car. Turns out she did just fine. She slept for most of it and when she wasn't happy, she would let us know. We stopped every 2 or 3 hours to play with her and do whatever changing and feeding that needed to happen.
That night, we hung out with Nathan, Jen, and Leo in their newish house. It was new to us, so we got the grand tour. During the tour, Jen showed us what will be the new baby's room. Yup, that's how she told us that she's pregnant. SHE'S HAVING ANOTHER BABY! She then showed us the rest of their house, which just seemed to keep on going. It was like there were rooms within rooms. Plenty of room in case they decided to birth another dozen or so babies. Mom and Ed then came by and we all went out to this BBQ place, since we said we weren't coming down to Raleigh without getting some Southern cookin. At the restaurant, we learned a valuable lesson. You can't turn your head away from an 8 month old when there's a two year old with food in the vicinity. Nathan must've seen us giving Lily some of our food, so he figured that it would be fine to shove a whole hush puppy in her mouth. When we turned back to her, she was making a disgusted face and had half the thing hanging out of her mouth. Lesson learned.We went back to the Trendowicz household and laid low for the rest of the night before heading to bed.
In the morning, we left the house and started making our way to Myrtle Beach. You know how when your going down 95 and you see tons of billboards for that little town where you can buy fireworks and play mini-golf? Well since Danielle's dad always denied her when they past it when she was little, it was my turn as a dad to say yes to going to this ridiculous little town. But now that we've been to South of the Border, I know why she was denied. The place is full of stores that are full of kitschy crap, though, I did buy myself some fireworks. But that's not even that special. They sell fireworks in the supermarkets down there.
After our little detour, we made our way to the beach house in North Myrtle Beach. The house had 6 bedrooms and we took one on the first floor that had room to fold out the pack n' play for Lily to sleep in. Unfortunately, "having room" meant that we had still to put her half in the closet. There was a second bed in our room, but we were afraid that she would roll off it, which she totally would have, so instead, it was baby central. It was just completely filled with every single item that we brought with us.
In addition to the house being full of new people for Lily to meet, there was also a dog. It made us a little nervous at first, but it ended up being a really good dog. We just wanted to make sure Lily was always being held, but I don't think she minded. Since the dog's tail was at eye level for her, every time it walked by, she laughed and thought it was funny that there was this wagging furry thing attached to this furry animal thing that walked around the house. It could have just been a floating tail for all she cared.
Overall, Lily did really good around our friends. She wasn't shy and didn't cry too much. Except for one day. On our first day hanging out on the beach, her little hidden away teeth decided to give her a hard time. The poor thing cried aaaaaaaalllll day. There was no stopping her. She pretty much cried herself to sleep. Since she's never like that, we knew something was wrong, but gladly there was only one day of that. All the other times we hung out on the beach, she seemed to actually love it. We figured that she would like the water, since she likes bath time and Grandma and Grandpa's pool and we were right. When it was low tide, it left some little ponds of piss-warm water that we were able to play with her in that she loved. Then I think she enjoyed the waves, but didn't quite know what to do with them since it never stayed still. You ever try to stand in one place and splash water whose level was constantly changing? Impossible. The cutest thing about the whole experience was the constant licking of her lips afterwards.
Since we didn't want us or Lily to burn, we didn't do the beach thing too much and had other activities to do. We went out for dinner one night (and got meats), went to Wonderworks one evening, and did a lot of hanging around the house. It was much tamer than a vacation with college friends would have been a few years ago, but we didn't mind. I'm sure that the next time we do this we won't be the only ones with a kid. I don't have any news to share, but that definitely seemed to be a frequent conversation topic with our friends while we were there.
The second half of our trip started with an hour long drive to Carolina Beach and a stop at Hardees, where the server kept calling Lily's pony tail a poof-poof. This house was a few blocks from the beach and was being shared with Mom and Ed and Jen, Leo and Nathan. This condo was definitely a bit more modern and had no dogs, so we felt better about having Lily play around on the floor. It was here on the floor that she developed a new way to get around by just skooching on her butt. At this point, she was starting to figure out her army crawl too.
We got to spend more time with her at the beach here and got more time with her cousin Nathan too. She's really too little to enjoy the beach to its fullest, so it'll be fun when she's older and she can play with Nathan in the sand and can walk on her own. At one point, during our trip, we had to spend half a day at the Nissan dealer since there were some issues with our car. The jerks who change my oil, didn't put stuff back together correctly, which cause oil to leak, which could have cause our engine to explode. No big deal. So while we were there, all pissed because this is how we were spending our vacation, Lily was as cute and happy as ever. We found this bouncy horsey thing that we put her on and she had as much fun as if we were at an amusement park. That made us feel a bit better since these vacations are just as much about her having fun, even though she won't remember it. We will though.
By the end of our week, we were ready to go home and kind of anxious to take the even longer ride back. It took about 12 hours to get back to Jersey, but again, Lilly was wonderful. We stopped at some diners and other road side eateries and Lily got to be touched and tickled by random strangers that are unaware of boundaries, but think babies are cute. I guess we'll have to teach Lily those lessons about touchy strangers later. Lily did fine on the ride home, but I think we were all happy to sleep in our own bed.
The rest of the month, Lily seemed to grow and evolve a lot. She nailed the army crawl that she had started in North Carolina. She even developed this kick-ass move in order to sit up that Uncle Chris seemed to love, which involved using her head as a pivot point and the weight of her butt to go from laying to sitting. Hard to explain, but funny to watch. She just seemed to have much more energy. It's like she absorbed some of Nathan's runoff from vacation, which there was a lot of. Since she was crawling and sitting on her own, we figured it was time to lower the crib. Stuff like this so far has been some of the most heartbreaking things we've had to do since it's proof that your baby is growing up. It feels like we just kicked her out of her bassinet. After we lowered it one notch, we learned that we better move it down all the way since it seemed like she was going to start standing soon. She also started figuring out the hand clapping thing that we've been trying to teach her a few times, but just kind of stopped once she figure that one out. She also had a few days of the funny little lip-smacking thing she would do with her tongue when we would feed her. It was a throw-back to her beach bumming days of yester-week. I would say that she's just getting more fun overall.
Well I know that this post is long overdue, but my mornings and evenings have definitely been busier spending as much time as I can with Lily. Her mobility has us jumping up to make sure she doesn't find some stairs to tumble down or dust bunnies to eat.
