So… it turns out that baby’s first trip was great. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And yes, things were stressful at times, but, the whole thing was worth it. And now we’ve done it once, we know we can do it again easy. Maybe. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 5 months it’s that babies are constantly changing, which means changing their minds and their reactions to things all the time. Like, last night was the first bath she’s ever had a bath and not cried at the end of it. We did nothing different, so that great experience was all Molly. Anyway, I’m off topic. I’m supposed to be writing about our trip.
The car ride there was fine. I don’t know if you’ve ever travelled from Cambridge to Chesterfield but the majority of it is on the A1. Molly slept for the first 45 minutes and then woke up and played for a little while. About 15 minutes until we were to leave the A1 she started whingeing and so we were planning to stop just after our exit. We decided it didn’t make sense to stop a few junctions up from our exit. Little Molly decided she was going to fall back to sleep in that time though meaning we made it to our destination relatively stress free. Win!
The week was brilliant. Having my side of the family around and spending time with Molly was amazing and I really enjoyed myself. We went everywhere. I love horses so we went to Chatsworth horse trials and had a picnic which she loved! And while we were in the Peak District we bought her a new wool mattress (half price!). I don’t know if her wool crib mattress is a contributing factor in her great sleeping but I’m not prepared to take chances so wool was the only option for her cotbed mattress. I digress again, I’ll save that for another time.
Her sleeping changed while we were away, which I kind of expected. She’s never slept in anything but her crib at home so I knew it would be some sort of miracle if she slept just as good in her travel cot in a new place. She wasn’t bad, she just didn’t want to go back to sleep after waking at around 2am. And that resulted in my first experience of co sleeping. I swore I’d never do it, but, it’s amazing how all of that seems to go out of the window after baby arrives. Maybe I’ll save that for another blog.
Overall, the whole trip was great and I wonder now why I was so worried about it. She was great. And even if she wasn’t we would have dealt with it and we still would have enjoyed ourselves. I think I’ve learned a lesson here. Even if things don’t work out as we planned, they still work out.
