Our trip to Vermont and other thoughts

I started this post on Monday, June 26, but because baby Doodle did not sleep more than 20 minutes at a time yesterday I'm still working on it.

Baby Doodle, Mr. D and I got back last night from Long Island and Vermont where gramginia lives. Baby Doodle got to meet his only living great grandparent, my mother's father, and was enchanted by him. He smiled and cooed like crazy when my grandpa was talking to him. Baby Doodle is very interested in new people, especially interesting ones like my grandfather. BD got to meet many many family members and friends over the last ten days. He met four of his great aunts and two cousins once removed. (Those are my first cousins -- my cousins' kids and BD will be second cousins. Cousins are once, twice, three times removed depending on how many generations seperate them -- so my cousins are BD's cousins once removed, my cousins and BD's kids will be cousins twice removed, and my cousins' grandkids and my grandkids will be third cousins.) I hope this doesn't further confuse your understanding of the family tree.

From Long Island BD and I drove to Vermont with my mother and Mr. Doodlebug drove home to work Monday and Tuesday. He drove up to Vermont on Tuesday night to be with us for the remainder of the week. Our third anniversary was Wednesday, more on that later. My mother and I got to her house last Monday and she promptly came down with a 102 degree fever. So my hope of having full time help with BD for an entire week and her hope of getting to spend a week cuddling, kissing and caring for BD were dashed. We left Saturday morning for Uncle Doodlebug's house in Essex Junction, Vermont. We had planned to attend our friends' wedding (in Vergennes at 2:00) and reception (in Charlotte -- that's the Vermont pronunciation, Shar Lot -- at 5:00), but as the time drew closer I realized that I couldn't leave BD with my brother and his girlfriend for eight hours. First of all, I had not pumped nearly enough milk to feed BD four times so he would have to have formula to supplement his meals. I was afraid that he would become constipated from the formula, which is known to happen. I was afraid that BD wouldn't drink smoothly from a bottle even though he had been practicing in preparation for this trip. I was also afraid that if he did drink smoothly from the bottle he wouldn't want to eat from my breasts any more because it is so much easier to get milk from a bottle than from my nipple. So for all of these reasons we skipped the ceremony and went to the reception. It was definitely the right decision, though BD did very well with my brother and his nurse girlfriend.

Baby Doodle developed like crazy while we were away. He can now hold his hands together, in fact he seems to prefer it. He can hold a toy and put it in his mouth, as he does with his clasped hands. He can laugh! He has smiled a lot in the last month, but now he can laugh, too. My brother was the first to discover it. He laughed for the first time when Uncle Doodlebug was in the middle of changing his diaper and he squirted an arced stream of pee into the air and onto the floor. He found this to be quite funny. He laughed again the next morning when Uncle Doodlebug was talking to him and I was holding him allowing me to verify that he can in fact laugh. He seems to really like his only uncle, which is good as his uncle is crazy about him. BD laughed a third time to me that same day, but he hasn't done it since we've been home. He can also drink from a bottle without the slightest problem and digested the little formula that he had just fine -- of course it was mixed with breastmilk, the best stuff on earth.

So June 21 is summer solstice, the longest day of the year and Mr. D and my anniversary. We were planning to go out to eat at a good restaurant in Rutland, Vermont, but my mother was sick and we couldn't leave BD behind. Instead we went to our friends' house in Killington to have pizza, beer and Ben and Jerry's with them.

Mr. Doodlebug and I have been married for three years. So much has happened in those three years -- I went back to school and got my Masters degree in secondary education, I taught for a year at a middle school outside DC which was the worst experience of my life, we moved to Philadelphia uprooting our entire existence and transplanting it in a place where we knew no one, and we had a baby. It's hard to say what would be if such and such hadn't happened or if you had never met so and so, but I know that my life is good because I'm married to Mr. D. He is utterly devoted to me, and I to him. We have helped each other get through some depressing and difficult things, but most of the time we lead a content life. We compliment each other. He is very tolerant and I am not so tolerant, he avoids conflict and I am argumentative, he doesn't mind eating the older food in the fridge (or rather he minds but does it anyway) and I do, we both love our son in a way that he will never fully understand until he has his own children. And we love each other. We're well suited for one another. There is no one else in the world I would rather spend my days and years with. Here's to living many more happy years together.





















On our way to the wedding reception leaving baby Doodle for the first appreciable amount of time.
















Mr. Doodlebug and BD in Vermont, one of the most beautiful places on earth, but so so far away, at least that's how it seems when you have a 12-week old.
















BD talking to his great grandfather.

















This was part of the Vermont section of the drive from Essex Junction, (near Burlington) to Philadelphia. No wonder it took us 9 hours to get home.