This post is long overdue. We took Adria camping to San Simeon State Park near Hearst Castle about a month ago, on the weekend of 6/18/10. This was Adria’s first camping trip, and our first since she was born (and for a while prior to her birth, too). We met Amanda’s parents at the campground, and the 5 of us had a great time over the course of 2 nights and parts of 3 days.

Now, just so we’re clear, this was car camping. We weren’t exactly roughing it. Here’s what I packed into the Rav-4 before we left:

Our piles of stuff that we took “camping”

In the pile you can see a cooler for our food (and Adria’s milk), our huge tent, Adria’s pack’n'play, an air mattress, three pillows, our sleeping bags, a bag for our clothes and things (hey, at least it wasn’t a suitcase), a day-pack, diapers and wipes, a chest for our camping gear (stove, fuel, lamps, etc), and some other stuff. When the car’s right there, might as well pack it, no?

Prior to the trip, Amanda found a good deal on a huge 8-man tent and we ordered it online. To give you an idea, they allow about 2 feet per person to sleep…which makes this tent 16 feet long, which is enough room to put in three queen air mattresses if we wanted. It looked like this:

The 16-man tent, all set up

We set Adria’s bed up right inside it, on one end:

Ivan, Adria, and the crib set up inside the tent

It ended up being a good deal colder than we expected at night. We kept Adria bundled up in her warmest clothes, plus one of us was often holding her, and we had blankets for her as well:

Adria all bundled up

At night, we put her to bed with double sleeper PJ’s on, plus two blankets and the quilt that Geoff and Katie made for her, doubled over a few times. She slept great. Amanda and I, on the other hand, were borderline too cold both nights with our flannel Coleman sleeping bags (we have mummy bags, but who would have thought there’d be a need?).

Here’s Adria bundled up in her quilt on the first morning, staying warm with Ivan. It sort of seems hard to believe even now, but it was really quite cold:

Adria bundled up in the morning

We went to the beach in the morning, where it was even colder due to the strong, gusty wind off of the water. Adria loved it, though, and she wasn’t afraid to get herself (or Elmo) dirty. I love this photo of Adria and Amanda (and Elmo) at the beach:

Amanda and Adria at the San Simeon Beach

In the afternoon we went to Hearst Castle, which is just a few miles up the road from the campground. This is the mansion estate of William R. Hearst, and it’s really one of those things that you have to see to believe. Hearst had a lot of money and a lot of ideas for this estate. To give you an idea, the grounds once included a full zoo with some rather exotic animals, which have since been donated to “real” zoos. Clearly, Adria loved the tour:

Adria napped in Ivan’s arms for the second half of the tour

Ivan was taking some good photos of the mansion for a while, and then they suddenly stopped. I wonder why that was?

Back at the campground, Adria discovered her shadow. On a later walk she stole my hat, put it on, and then to add insult to injury she put me in a pretty good head-lock. At least it made for a cute photo.

Adria wearing Drew’s Hokie hat

We took another walk to the beach, in which Adria’s willingness to stay swaddled in a blanket clearly demonstrates how cold it was. Amanda took this cute shot of Adria and I staring off into the sunset:

Adria and Drew watching the sunset

And after a few minutes of playing with our headlamps, we put Adria down to bed the same way as before. She went to bed without a peep.

Adria playing with the headlamp

Day three was pretty much just packing up and getting on the road. Adria did a lot of playing in the cars (where it was naturally warm from the sun), but she played in the campground as well. It took us a while to get all of our stuff together, but mostly the delay was just getting the tents dry. They accumulated quite a bit of dew overnight.

Overall, I’d say our camping trip was a success! We learned a few things. One is, when you are car camping, there’s no excuse to not pack enough warm clothes. Another is that the tent is huge and we could be in real danger of not having enough space to set it up….but Adria slept perfectly in the great outdoors, so maybe there is more camping in our future!?

Remember when you used to wear shoes out? Not like having a lace break, or a seam fail or a sole come unglued, etc…but utterly ruining them until they barely held together, with holes in the toe, and sole, and heel? Yeah, I barely do, too…but I have mental pictures of a few pairs of Sambas that were pretty tattered in the end.

Well, Adria is well on her way, I think. Her little brown pair of Pediaped’s have had a good run. They are her favorites, I think partially because she can get them on (and off) by herself (note that she gets them on the wrong feet first, and then after a brief experiment, fixes them):

I don’t think that these are going to make it to a second child…here’s what they look like, top and bottom:

Worn toes of Adria’s shoes

Holes in the soles almost all the way through

Ah, well…nothing lasts forever. But we’ll miss the brown shoes when they are gone, we have had some good times.

I mentioned earlier that Adria had some intuition about how the gate latch worked, and was caught trying to escape from the play area at daycare. Well…this is at the park, not daycare, but it’s the same idea. I didn’t put her up there, show her the gate, or even point it out to her. She sought it out on her own. Look at the intensity on her face…

Looking for a way out of here

Ah-hah! Found it!

All I have to do is flip this lever…

All…..most….got…..it!

I grabbed her before she was able to figure it out. Didn’t seem like a good precedent to set.

Plus, she was sort of straddling the moving and non-moving parts of the gate there at the end…

Our car stereos have officially been taken over by Adria. I thought for a while that she would like what I played, as long as it was reasonable…maybe Pink Floyd, or one of those “80’s, 90’s, and today” type of light stations (yeah, the fact that I don’t know what they say now that the 00’s need to be in there really dates me). Well, I tried that, and…nope. Give ‘em a taste of ‘baby music’ and it’s all over.

Now, she requests “her” music while we are still strapping her in to the car seat. If you don’t start it right away, or if you play something different, she often gets insistent: “More! More! More!", while pointing at the dashboard.

Amanda and I each have 2 or 3 CD’s in our cars that we play. In my case, it’s a memory stick with 2 albums on it, so it repeats around them both. Baby songs are short, so one album has 25 songs and the other has about 45. I know them all quite well now.

One thing that I find interesting is that my tastes in baby music have already changed. At first, I liked the familiar songs, like “The Ants Go Marching In” or “No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed". Ali had sent me some Music Together songs, which initially I found, quite honestly, really annoying. One of the tracks, for example, has no music and the male vocalist sings “Baa baa ba-ba, ba ba baa ba baaa ba!” and on and on for 2 minutes. When I first heard it, I could hardly stand it. And then…Adria started walking around singing “Ba ba ba ba!!” Then my heart melted, and now I have come around to Music Together. And after listening to both albums around about 2 dozen times, I find that the Music Together stuff is much more repeatable…it has quality instrumental bits, great vocals, and no barely-audible children singing. Hearing the kids sing the songs may be cute on the first go around, but believe me…it gets old fast.

Anyhow…our music is no longer our own. When I am alone in the car, it’s all My Chemical Romance, Muse, Angles and Airwaves…the kind of stuff that Adria would never tolerate. Gotta get my rock and alternative in when I can.

I think that Amanda finally has Adria’s room the way she wants it.

When Amanda’s parents came down for Easter, they brought the truck and returned to Northern California with the queen sized bed that we were using in the spare bedroom. With that gone, we moved Adria’s crib and changing table into the spare bedroom, and got our master bedroom back!

Still, Amanda wasn’t done. All of my space posters got the boot, and I patched the holes that their nails left in the walls. I moved the computer into our bedroom with a new desk that Amanda picked out. I even switched our Internet provider to DSL…for several reasons, but one was to move the modem from the cable jack in her room, out to the phone jack in the living room. We moved the filing cabinet out, moved the shag carpet in, and Amanda decorated the space that the computer left with all of Adria’s stuffed animals. This past weekend she found a small table and a set of chairs that sit on the corner of the rug.

Finally, Amanda’s coup de grâce was a set of press-on (static-cling type) letters and flowers that she used to decorate the walls. She spent over a week optimizing the words that she could spell with her limited set of letters, and then over the weekend (with Dianne’s help), she decorated the walls. Tonight we got out the laser level and got the bottoms of the letters mostly in line…here’s the result:

“Adria’s Room", with lots of flowers

A closeup of the flower wall

Animal sounds over the closet doors

Flowers above the changing table and our message

Adria playing with her new table and chairs

This has been an interesting process, and worth an update even though it’s only been two days. After deciding once and for all to wean Adria from the bottle, we basically went cold turkey. During the day, we are not giving Adria milk from a bottle, at all. We continually try to get her to drink it out of various kinds of cups…here’s a photo of some of the things we are using:

Adria’s sippy cup collection

Clockwise from the upper left, we have:

1. Playtex sippy cup: This has a valve, doesn’t leak when knocked over, and you have to suck on it reasonably hard to get the milk out (yes, I’ve tried it. I’ve tried them all).
2. Playtex straw cup: This is an extremely clever little cup. You can slide the yellow lock to pinch off the tube, and it doesn’t leak. It has a valve inside so it is already pretty spill-proof, and it also comes apart in every way imaginable for cleaning. This is her water cup, and she loves it. We’ve tried milk in this before, but not during this transition…we don’t want to set a negative association with her main water cup.
3. Nuk cup with handle and sippy nipple: a very sturdy little cup that is easy to hold, and mostly leak-proof (but not if Adria tries hard).
4. Nuk cup with handle removed and bottle nipple: another of our Nuk cups, but the handles snap off, and we swapped the nipple out for a bottle-style nipple. This flows fast and will definitely leak if tipped over or held upside down.
5. Sippy cup: a cheap plastic sippy cup. The milk comes out reasonably fast but there is some resistance, so it doesn’t leak very fast.

You may have noticed that most of those bottles actually have milk in them. This is because she won’t drink it, so we just put it back in the fridge, and try again later. Try, try again. Every now and then she’ll give it a try, get all affronted about it, and go back to ignoring that cup.

I was hoping that the Nuk cup with a bottle nipple would be a good transition. Without the handles, it is just a differently shaped bottle from her usual. If she would take than, then we could put the handles back, and then eventually swap the nipple out. But no…she’s onto me, and she refuses this too.

Interestingly, Adria has been eating great since we basically stopped giving her milk. She gets hungry, asks for food, and eats it. This is so novel for us, that we’re having a hard time seeing the downside of this transition. She gets her fluids from her water cup, and we’ve stepped up her cheese and yogurt consumption a bit to make up for the lost protein and milk-fat. She seems no worse for wear at all without the milk.

We are still giving Adria her night-time bottle…milk, in a standard bottle. We want her to get some milk, so she’ll at least get six ounces a day this way. We put vitamins in this bottle, too. Ironically, this bedtime bottle is the one that we most want to kick, but it will be the last to go. It’s bad for her teeth, she drinks it in a more reclined position than during the day, and then she goes and lays down immediately. But…we want her to get the nutrients in the milk, and we also want her to keep a taste for it. We’re not trying to wean her from milk, just the bottle. That evening bottle is a whole different animal, since it is the linchpin of our (very effective) bedtime routine. We’ll cross that bridge later.

One of the reasons that the blog has been shy on photos for a while is that I managed to destroy yet another point-and-shoot digital camera:

Broken Powershot SD870 IS: lens won’t retract

Needless to say, this was disappointing…but not entirely unexpected. This camera had a tendency to turn itself on easily, and I would often find it on (with the lens extended) in my pocket. Eventually, having the lens jam repeatedly like this caused the lens drive mechanism to fail.

My phone has a 5 megapixel camera on board, so I used that for a while. It was tempting to simply not replace the point-and-shoot….but let’s face it, cell phone cameras suck. The barrel distortion and chromatic aberration are clearly visible, low-light sensitivity is terrible, and the lens is so small that it’s impossible to keep the pictures from blurring when your subject is moving. And, kids do move. My mom and my wonderful wife convinced me that I would be disappointed later if the only snapshots that I had from this period (not counting times when I had the SLR around) were cell phone photos. So, I went shopping for a new camera.

After a while, I settled on the ruggedized models…the zoom lens is internal to the camera, so there can be no repeat performance of the SD870’s demise. Also, these type of cameras are often waterproof, dust/sand/grit proof, and shock proof. Perfect for the rough handling it might get from either me or Adria…with the added bonus that I could use it without fear in or near the pool or the ocean.

So after much study, I bought a Lumix TS1 by Panasonic. Shocker, I know. This is my first non-Canon camera, ever…but Canon doesn’t seem to make a ruggedized pocket camera. So, we’ll give this one a whirl…it is taking some getting used to, but it seems to take quality photos. I just need some practice to get that muscle memory back…I was extremely quick with my Canon cameras, and I feel very clumsy with this so far (hey, it’s only been a day).

For fun, I made a chart of how long each of my cameras survived me, and approximately how many photos I took with each:

Chart of digital camera usage

The A70, my first camera, lasted a while…in fact, it overlaps two other cameras. This camera was replaced before it broke, and I used it for skiing and other camera-hazardous activities. I finally broke it in early 2008. The SD400 met a tragic end in the Russian River, on my bachelor party canoe trip. The SD600 was bought in a Circuit City in Santa Rosa the next day, just prior to our wedding. That camera actually still works and hangs around the coffee table, but it was in my pocket so long, and used so much, that the flash lens is fogged and it smokes every time a flash photo is taken. The SD870 just died in my pocket a few weeks ago…but, I did get over 5000 photos out of it, which I suspect is more than most people can say about any camera.

The last two are my SLR’s. I was very careful with my 10D…it still works, and was recently retired and replaced by the 5D Mark II. But with that camera, I took 21 thousand photos! That is close to the sum of all of the point and shoot cameras combined…which I suppose just says that I shoot with the point-and-shoots and SLR’s about equally, at the end of the day (year).

So…here’s hoping that the Lumix lasts for more than a year and 4 months…let’s get started!

It wouldn’t surprise me if Adria has been able to use a slide by herself for a while…they have several at daycare. But up until this weekend, we have been pretty protective on the slides, and the most we’ve done is to have one of us send her down from the top, with another of us at the bottom to catch. This works pretty well on the straight slides, but we’ve had her turn around sideways or backwards on the spiral slides a couple of times.

Well, she’s getting stronger and her balance is constantly improving. This little slide is quite small, so we set her up there to try it by herself a couple of times. As you can see, she’s not afraid to push herself over the hump…and she loves it!

I might be biased, but I think we have the cutest baby ever.

The teachers at Adria’s daycare often “help” the kids make crafts for the occasion of certain holidays, such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween, etc. For Thanksgiving, they made little pilgrim hats for the kids. We packed the baby’s up for our trip to Northern California for Thanksgiving. Here Amanda put it on Adria somewhere along the drive north, while we were stopping for a break…

Amanda putting Adria’s pilgram hat on her

Adria and her pilgram hat

Amazingly, even though she almost always tries to take hats off immediately, she repeatedly showed patience for this particular head-wear. Must have been comfortable??

Amanda got Adria a walker toy, since the baby seems to only need the slightest bit of help in order to walk. This thing has an upright mode (shown) to help assist the kids in toddling, and then later you can snap it down into a ride-on toy and get a little more daylight out of it.

Adria standing with her walker

She hasn’t really taken to walking behind this thing yet, although she will stand with it and does like to play with the toys that are attached to it. We keep trying, she’ll get it one of these days…for now it seems to sort of startle her that it moves, and she doesn’t trust it to lean on (smart girl).

A few weeks ago Amanda brought home a new toy for Adria. It is a little table that stands maybe 18 inches tall, and the surface is loaded with buttons and levers and sliders and things. It makes sounds, of course, and has lots of different modes…music only, sounds only, a ‘learning’ mode, and even a mode that says everything once in English and then again in Spanish.

Well, Amanda brought this thing home and set it down to put it together, and Adria jumped on it. Literally…she pounced on the toy, still in the box, and sat on top of it and played frantically for 15 minutes or more while we watched. I think she likes it.

Adria sitting on top of her new toy, playing

Literally, sitting on top of it

I’ll spare you the video this time, but naturally I got a few seconds on my point-and-shoot.

This has actually proved to be a great toy. Not only does she love it and return to it often, but it has helped her learn to stand on her own. In fact, I first saw her stand with no hands in front of this thing, albeit only for a second or two.

Adria loves goldfish crackers. She used to eat Cheerios here and there, but given the option she clearly picks the goldfish:

We have to ration the goldfish…the first time Adria was exposed to them while Amanda had her out of the house, she had stuffed 6 into her mouth before Amanda noticed. And she’s not great at chewing yet.

Don’t worry, we got the whole grain goldfish crackers. They’re healthy.

Our friend GB sent us some genuine Hokie gear from Blacksburg, since he is there for every one of Tech’s home football games. Adria now has a very cute one-piece romper, and a collared onesie that looks like a sophisticated golf or tennis shirt (tucked in!). Thanks GB, we appreciate it!

Adria romping in her VT romper

Thinking about eating a Cheerio off of the floor

About to head to the club…with her fuzzy cat book

So everyone knows that we use cloth diapers, but it’s not quite that simple. After 10 months we’ve sort of settled into a hybrid diapering scheme that works well for us, so I thought I’d lay it out.

We use cloth diapers about 90% of the time, in terms of number of diapers. In terms of time on the baby, though, it’s more like 50/50! Adria is in cloth diapers at daycare (where they check her every 2 hours or less) and around the house (where we do the same). At night, though, we put her in a paper (disposable) diaper. This helps with diaper rash and lets her sleep better…she basically never wakes up needing to be changed.

The second diaper of the day is also paper.   This is because Adria is remarkably regular. When she wakes up, she needs to be changed badly from the night…we put another paper diaper on, let her crawl around and play a little, and then sometime in the next hour she has her only (or at least most significant) BM of the day. That goes in the trash, and it’s cloth from then on. Perfect.

We also use paper diapers when we know that we won’t be at home when we change the next diaper. For example, going to a dinner party where we’ll be out more than an hour or two, or going to Descanso for a few hours, etc. While it’s not particularly difficult to change a cloth diaper on the road, it’s not terribly pleasant to tote the dirty diaper around until we can get home and take care of it properly. Better to be able to throw it away wherever we are.

And finally, we use paper diapers exclusively when we travel for real. Visiting the grandmas in Napa or Virginia, we leave the cloth at home. In fact, we often don’t even pack the diapers…just enough to get us through the trip, and then buy new ones on the other end.

I think we’ve struck a pretty good balance between the convenience of paper and the economy/ecology aspects of cloth diapering. As far as Adria goes, it’s very tough to tell if she prefers one over the other…but she definitely lets us know sooner if a cloth diaper is wet.

This past weekend we went to a one-year birthday party for Christopher, a baby in Adria’s class at daycare. It was a fun party, with lots of great food and nice people (it’s good to be able to meet the daycare parents outside of school…and to learn their names, instead of just saying “Johnny’s Mom", etc).

Turns out, though, that my big photographic takeaway from the party was the portable ball pit that they had set up in the grass. This was like a mesh pack’n'play that was full of hard plastic balls, and Adria immediately locked onto this thing and crawled over to it…

The Earth and the Moon

…and then inside…

The money shot of Adria in the ball pit

…where she got stuck.

Running up against the mesh wall of the pit

Wait, what is this stuff??

Adria trying to escape the ball pit

I rescued her pretty shortly after that last photo. She wasn’t getting upset, she was just curious about why she could see the grass but couldn’t get to it. I could tell that frustration was coming, though, and the bigger kids were coming too…so it was time to abandon the ball pit and move on.

Amanda’s friend Alison just sent Adria an adorable hand-knitted dress and hat, out of the blue!

Adria investigating her new dress

Adria giving her mom a big smile

I think the baby and the clothes compliment each other well.

I’ll admit it, I have knitted before, in my youth…it’s not easy. Oh, sure, I could make rectangular things, like coasters and scarfs and placemats. Just knitting isn’t that hard…but look at that dress! Patterns, multiple colors, shapes other than rectangles! It makes me tired just thinking about it. Thanks Alison, we’ll make good use out of these!

Adria seems to have my picky tastes in food, and I’m sure that Amanda wished that she didn’t. She is a moderately good eater when it comes to the solid foods, but it still seems that she likes the blander foods more…

We went to the Montrose Street Fair on Sunday (more on that later), and picked up a wonderfully ripe cantaloupe that they were giving out samples of. It was soft, mild, and delicious…so we decided to give it a shot in one of her little teether bags.

Really, who doesn’t like cantaloupe?? Even *I* like cantaloupe… (she had already tasted it before I started this video, so she wasn’t just avoiding it on principal…)

You’ve gotta love that innocent look once Amanda hands her the pouch. But oh, boy, we did love playing with our melon…

Adria not eating her cantaloupe

Adria has started to pull up on various things, one of her favorites being the baby gate itself. We noticed that her feet are often sweaty…and therefore slippery…and sometimes she falls because her feet slide out from underneath her.

Well, she should probably just learn how to keep her center of gravity, etc…but as an experiment Amanda got out one of the pairs of shoes that we have for her and we tried them on. It was quite the amusing experience…

Here’s a still of her in those cute shoes…

Adria’s first time in shoes

Since Adria has started pulling herself up on things, we went ahead and lowered the crib last week to the lowest mattress position. It’s quite deep now, she won’t be able to get out until she can literally climb up the bars and go over the rail. But if she takes after me, maybe that won’t be so long after all….

On a side note, lowering the crib does make it decidedly more difficult to get Adria in and out of the thing. Our first crib was sort of up on feet, and you could get your toes underneath it if you wanted to get close. The replacement crib, though, has a ’skirt’ of sorts that hugs the carpet. So not only do we have to bend over further to lay down a heavier baby, but your center of gravity is further from the crib because you can’t get your feet underneath it or brace your knees against it. Well, minor gripe…we’ll manage.

“Baby Proof” refers, of course, to the ability of others to know that you have a baby by looking at your home. The outlet covers, cabinet locks, baby gates, foam table corners…all of these things are good proof that you do, indeed, have a baby.

We have had the living room formally baby-proofed for a week now. We went to Lowe’s and bought the standard stuff, including outlet covers and doorknob locks for our bathroom doors:

Baby-proofing supplies

Amanda had previously ordered a long gate that she predicted would span the living room from side-to-side. And it did, save for about 1 inch that it came up short.

I went back to Lowe’s and found a nice board that was intended to be a threshold piece under an exterior door, and I stained it up nice and used it to bridge the gap. Then I installed gate into studs on both sides and now we have the living room divided into the Adult Section and the Kid Section:

Gated living room from the outside

The gate has a door that we often leave open when we are playing with Adria directly or have her under close supervision. It will also unhook from the wall at either end, with some effort, so it could be pushed up against the far wall or removed entirely if we so desired…

Gated living room from the inside

We replaced the rug with something softer (and much nicer, not to mention cleaner), put foam corners on the coffee table, moved the home theater electronics into the cabinets with glass doors, and temporarily obscured the wires behind her baskets of toys (those wires will soon be in the wall, when the extension cables arrive in the mail). It’s quite the setup, and it has worked out well so far.

The main object of desire left in the living room is the fireplace. I have zip-tied the wire mesh closed, and also zip-tied it along the bottom as best I can. I don’t think that she can really hurt herself on the fireplace, but it is still very dirty and we are using it as a training point…with our luck, her first word is going to be “hot” because we use it strongly in reference to the fireplace.

Adria has already explored her space. She has been to the glass doors (or screen, as the case may be), behind the coffee table to the sofas, under the coffee table (where she got stuck and had to be rescued), and of course up to the gate itself. Here’s a cute photo of Adria longing to be in the Adult side of the room with her momma…

Adria rattling the bars