Our first road trip!

Nathan went out of the country for the first time yesterday, to the not so far city of Buffalo. :) Steve had this week off and we decided to see what it would be like to travel with Nathan by taking a short road trip with him. We will be spending 3 nights here and another night at the grandparents' on the way home. Long enough to mimic what a longer vacation would be like. Short enough for a good experiment. But most importantly, close enough to home so that if anything were to happen, we could always just change our plans and go home.

The Car Ride
This actually was pretty easy since we stopped off to lunch with Grandma on the way to Buffalo. Nathan napped in the car on the way. Mommy, Daddy and baby were fed before we completed the rest of our journey. Considering that the trip from the grandparents' to the hotel was only one hour, we did not drive far at all. We synced up our car journey to when Nathan's naps were so that made things much easier too and he pretty much slept the entire time we were driving. We will try to do this again on our way back.

Sleep
We try to make sure he still gets enough sleep and gets his naps but of course, we threw off his schedule a bit with us going out. Yesterday, we decided to not go out for dinner and just order in pizza (not that that is a compromise by any means since Steve was looking forward to eating Papa John's pizza). We already went out and about to do some shopping after we got here so he was already sleeping later than usual. Going out for dinner was just asking for trouble. We purposely chose a one bedroom suite hotel for our stay complete with a full kitchen. The two areas are separated by a door so we were able to put him in his pack & play to sleep in the bedroom while we ate dinner and watched TV in the sitting area. When he woke up for his feed, we pushed the pack & play back out to the main area so we could prepare for bed without disturbing him. This has worked really well so far. Overall his first night sleeping was okay, waking up every 3 hours to feed just like at home. He cried a bit to go back to sleep each time but at least he was okay falling asleep by himself.

Now that we are traveling with a little one, we also made adjustments to our schedule during the day so as not to disturb his sleep too much. Like right now, he's napping and we're just chilling in the hotel until he wakes up. We plan on going out for the rest of the day until after dinner, so we might as well let him get his total sleep count somewhat decent first. :)

Gear
It's a good thing we have an SUV, because we had so much of Nathan's gear to bring along. I already tried to pack light, but light only meant everything fit and we had a little room to buy stuff. We found out the morning we left that the hotel we were staying at also offers pack & plays for guests, but we already brought our own, which I think I still prefer since they said that they weren't a guarantee. The stroller and the pack & play already take up a good chunk of cargo space. We also brought along Nathan's portable rocking chair so he'd have somewhere to sit instead of just lying in the playpen all day or need to be held by us. Nathan had his own little bag of clothes, a big bag with a pack of his diapers, toys, blanket, playpen sheets, wipes, and a few extra things like paper towels, tissues, garbage bags for the stay and car ride. All this stuff, and we haven't even gotten to our own stuff. When we pushed our luggage into the hotel on those luggage carts, it seemed like we were moving in! But in reality, it really wasn't that much once you take it off the cart and use the stuff.

I brought one long sleeve onesie, one short sleeve onesie, and one sleeper for each day we were gone, with the usual backups in the diaper bag. He also had 2 pairs of pants, a thicker sweater, a thin sweater, and a snowsuit. I thought it might have been a bit of an overkill but I didn't really want to risk him leaking onto this clothes and us not having clothes for him or needing to do laundry. It was a good thing I brought enough clothes, he's already on his 3rd sleeper of the day!

Nathan's up! Will write more later.

Oh...and happy 4 months Nathan! We will celebrate with a good dinner tonight. ;)