8-Weeks Adventure and a Lesson Learned

Yesterday Mara reached her 8 week mark, which we decided to make memorable while getting something that each of us needed. Mara had her two month appointment at a Googleween event, I got my first real social outing since Mara's birth, and kitty had a checkup visit at the vet to try to win her dignity back after healing well from her recent fierce battles.

Willow fought some wild animal in our backyard and got some severe bite marks on her back and tail. She now looks ridiculous and is trying to cover it up by taking cute stances in her plastic cone.

This meant we pretty much had our whole family in the car (excluding feathered members) and spent the whole day out in parking lots, roads with ridiculous traffic and crowds of people.

Doctor's office

The very first part of the trip went great and gave us the confidence to attempt the rest of our plans, after being in doubts all morning. Mara stoically accepted all the tests at the doctor's office and bestowed upon them the honor of a humongous poopie and open-air pee that had three people cleaning it for about 10 min. She is doing great, gained 2 lbs since last time which brought her from the 51st to the 73rd percentile in weight! (yay for mommy who was worried about under-performing!).

Then the nurse did the first round of immunization shots, and Mara was much stronger about it than I was. Greg had the forethought of offering me a Kleenex ahead of time and I laughed at it, but as soon as the shot was happening I teared up and kept apologizing to the baby for causing her such pain. I remembered too well how the pain lasted for two days after my most recent anti-tetanus shot. I think this whole pregnancy thing has literally turned me into mush and I finally fully understand that quote by Elisabeth Stone:

Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Today I felt the most vulnerable that I have ever been, and painfully aware that there is no getting better, there is just getting used to it.

Googleween

We went on to the next thing on our plate, Googleween and a snack lunch at Google because we missed the lunch time by about 10 min and everything was already cleaned up in the 2 cafes we checked.
The event was a blast, with lots of fun stations like make-your-own hand puppet, build a robot / slime putty, artistic face painting and such, the absolute best pretzels I've ever tasted and delicious kettle corn.

But the most entertaining part of all were the kids.

Every single one with a funnier costume, they seemed to be all there for the grown-ups' enjoyment. Every little human was humbledly walking, with floppy ears or pointy antennas twisting their heads in uncomfortable ways, paws and tentacles and arthropod legs flapping about and tails swooshing through the air in wonderful colors, and they all took it with bravery because they were each convinced they had the coolest costume.  It's literally like walking through a sea of differently-sized, awkwardly moving, live LOLcats.

Mara curiously watched the crowd as this was the largest gathering she had ever experienced. She eventually fell asleep in the Moby about 20 minutes in, but we stayed for about 1.5h just filling our eyes with the inevitable mirth, pointing to each other one cute costumed kid over another.

Notes for the future:
1) The most hilarious thing you can put on a crawling toddler is a thickly limbed furry tarantula costume.

2) Making a family-wide costume is awesome!

During all this, the cat was semi-comfortably in her carrier under a tree because the vet could only see her about 3h afterward. She is so used to calmly waiting at the side of the ultimate field with large groups of people strolling by, that we were not worried at all about her, even though we checked on her often and made sure to be close within visual range to her carrier.

Remainder of the day out

Next came another part of our plan, the failure of which taught us a valuable lesson which can only be summarized as:

• don't plan more than one time-sensitive thing at a time with an 8-week old baby;
• if you are foolish enough to do it, don't do it right after her first round of immunizations;
• and if against all reason you fail to follow both of the previous two statements, do not, absolutely NOT choose the middle event to be the one that will end in a ton of traffic!

We wanted Mara to meet both our teams, now that we were all on campus during work hours. We managed to go see Greg's teammates who were right next to Googleween campgrounds, but getting her to my building proved to be a bad idea. The apparently simple process of taking her out of the Moby wrap and into the car seat turned into her absolute longest stretch of unconsoled crying! One and a half hours of it, first in the parking lot and then in the car while Greg was desperately trying to avoid the ridiculous after-event traffic. We ended up driving around in one of the LinkedIn parking lots for about an hour while I was singing the most repetitive on-the-spot made-up nursery rhyme:

I don't see / A crying baby with me, / I don't see a crying baaaby...

This was the only thing that kept all our sanities and slowly allowed dear sleep to creep over and into our little unsoothed tiny infant.

We had to skip the visit and we barely made it in time to the vet visit which was scheduled after hours so any more than the 8 minutes of delay in getting there would probably have gained Willow another week of The Elisabethan Collar.

We got through it all, got Willow the hope of having her freedom back as of this Sunday, and after one more hour of driving and two more hours of Mara upsettiness we got her to finally comfortably sleep a bit. She even had a well deserved and sorely needed full feeding an hour later!

We definitely all won this battle!

This day was a crazy, exciting adventure that ended up with two mentally exhausted grown-ups, one physically exhausted infant and one truly out-of-patience (yet the-most-patience-I-have-ever-seen-in-a-) cat.

Here's the photo of the day: Greg dressing Mara up pre-party in one of the Mothers' Rooms at Google: