beach baby

Hello from sunny North Carolina! Despite dreading the 13-hour drive here with a 5-month-old, it wasn't too bad. Miss Olivia did fairly well in the car except for the last 30 minutes of the trip, where we had to sing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" on a constant loop to keep her from crying (we were getting desperate for new animals and were including beavers and other creatures whose noises we had to invent on the fly). We stopped in Spartanburg, SC on the way there and spent the night in a hotel for a little break. She went in a pool for the first time ever, which she was unsure about at first but grew to love. (Sidenote: I'm not sure what the deal is with swim diapers, but I'll just say they don't seem to work. So sorry, Holiday Inn Express.)

Olivia LOVES the ocean. We take her for walks at night in the Baby Bjorn and she coos and cackles and is otherwise gleeful. She also enjoys her admiring public. I'm not sure how this child has ended up such a social butterfly, but she is such a ham. She laughs and smiles and makes lots of noise whenever we pass anyone on the beach and keeps it up until they pay attention to her. The 18 or so relatives of ours who are here in different beach houses are more than happy to give her the attention she needs, so she's having a blast.

Her so-regular-you-could-bake-cookies-to-them 30-minute naps have extended a bit while we've been here, which has been nice. And she threw us for a loop two nights in a row by going to bed at 10 p.m. and sleeping until 4:30, having one bottle, and then sleeping again until 7:30. Sadly, the last two nights have been more her normal style: up until 11 p.m. or midnight, then up at 2 a.m., 3:30 a.m., 5:00 a.m., and so on. I was really hoping she'd turned a corner, but I realized this morning at 3:50 a.m. as I paced around the kitchen trying to get a wide-awake baby back to sleep, that I was very wrong.

Vacation is winding down -- most of the family is heading home tomorrow. It's strange to not be dreading going home and back to work ... because there is no work to go back to. We're talking about driving straight through instead of stopping, but that may be sheer madness. I'll keep you posted.


Fascinated by the ocean:
First dip:Hanging out on the porch with daddy, looking super cool: