End of Summer

Hi there, people!  Tomorrow is September - no joke! - which means, meteorological calendars aside, I am declaring an end to summer and the beginning of autumn.  I love the fall.  As a longtime student and sometime teacher, fall has always meant new beginnings and fresh starts to me.  SLB and I got married in early September for this very reason.  September is a breath of fresh air and a chance to start anew.  It makes me think of newly sharpened pencils and possibilities.  In this calendrical and inspirational vein, I'll be starting some new writing projects on and off of this blog soon.  Summer's over, and it's time to hunker down and do something good, dammit.  But, until midnight when I become all virtuous and productive, let's linger over fine summer memories, shall we?

Like that time I took Livy to the Ballard water park, where she proved that a fleece Viking hat is, in fact, all-weather gear.

Pillaging knows no season.

Or that time I rode a mechanical bull in Las Vegas.

In hindsight, the blouson peasant top wasn't my most flattering bull-riding option.  Learn from my example, people.

Or that time I made forty-freaking-eight cupcakes, along with forty-freaking-eight cupcake toppers for Livy's 2nd birthday party.

I'm crafty.  I'm just your type.

Because I have an embarrassing tendency to do dumb things like this in the presence of a camera...

... let's let this sweet picture of Liv and her good friend Margaret stand in for the touching one of Liv and me that never manifested.

Or that time we went to the Oregon coast to play and to Sauvie Island to meet some new friends.

Livy LOVED the beach...

...

...

... until she didn't.

Handsome Baby Jake may be Sauvie Island's newest resident...

... but Livy preferred the goats.

Or the time we saw my boyfriend Steve play at the Snoqualmie Casino.

Flawlessly silver.  Flawlessly foxy.

Or that time I read 9 horny vampire novels in 6 weeks?

So far #9 was the best.

Or that time that Toddlers & Tiaras started making sense.

Bathing, basking belly.

As you can see, it's been a fantastic summer for frolicking and fun.  But my pencils are sharp, the tags are freshly off of my school clothes, and I've got a Trapper Keeper full of fresh college-ruled paper.  Summer's been great, but fall is here, and that's time to shine.

Tidbits and Whatnots

I haven't posted in over a week, which is dangerous when one has such a devoted fan base of obsessive parents, in-laws, and grandparents as I have.  But Livy, SLB, and I have been sick - REAL SICK - all over again, and I haven't wanted to take pictures or observe my own life, let alone formulate coherent blog posts about any of it.

So, here.  This is what you get.

1.  I have a cousin named Candice (known better as Kansas, Gorkus, Candy, and Candybaby).  She is awesome and can kill you with one shot from a hundred paces, no shit.  She's in the Navy and just got back from overseas where she fixed aircraft and did not have to put her sharpshooting skills to use, thank goodness.  She is as stubborn and hard-hearted as I am, and our family has speculated about the potential outcome of a fistfight between the two of us for decades.  Now that she can do a million pushups in a minute or whatever the military requires and I'm a squishy mom speculation has dwindled to... well... this blog post.

Livy is convinced that Candy is a celebrity because she's in 3 of the pictures on our fridge.  That means a lot when your exposure to the world generally consists of trips to the grocery store and reading a book about a mermaid parade 7 times a day.

2.  We are bad parents.

It's my kid in a box!  (Anyone wanting to make a joke about her birth will have to remember that I had a C-section).

3.  The Deschutes Brewery in Portland has both delicious beer and crafty beer bottle holiday lights.  There are tiny holes drilled in the back of the bottles to accommodate the twinkle lights that are strung behind the whole row.  If I ever get a fancy glass-bottle-hole-drilling machine I might make some of these.  But most likely I'll just post them here.

Perfect for a man cave.  O.K., the coast is clear; you can make your vagina joke now.

4.  With all due respect to The Pipettes, The Morah and I are the prettiest girls you've ever met.

We wear interesting jackets like the future candidates wives we are fast becoming.

5.  One of the best things about sharing a camera with SLB are the secret gems he leaves me on our memory card.  Viking dog agrees.

Jag håller med.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have more expectorating to do.

Summer of Awesome: San Juan Island Edition

Hey there!

Remember when I wrote my Life List?  Remember when I said I wanted to vacation in Friday Harbor and go whale watching with Livy and SLB?  Well, check and check, mofos, because a few weeks ago SLB took some time off and we journeyed north for an idyllic summer vacation.

After a pretty arduous drive and ferry ride with a teething baby (3 teeth came in during our 4 day vacation) we arrived in Friday Harbor just in time for a stroll around town, a delicious meal with a great view, and this sunset from our condo balcony.

Not bad, Friday Harbor.

Not bad at all.

SLB and I vacationed on San Juan Island once before when I was in college and he was preparing to leave for law school, and I'd stayed there a couple of times as a kid during summers when my dad was working and sailing there.  So we have a history, San Juan Island and I, and I've been eager to share this with Olivia even if she won't remember it.

There's a lot to like there.  For one thing, Roche Harbor literally welcomed SLB with his own dedicated graffiti in once-wet cement.

And, for another thing, people on San Juan Island like their puns and poop jokes.  I was among my people at last!

Yep, that's the B-Yacht'ch.  And the little boat tied to it is the Baby B-Yacht'ch.

I disapprove of the egregiously unnecessary misspelling, but otherwise I heartily approve!

This was on a porta-potty at the alpaca farm we visited.

And, because San Juan Island is a magical place, it offers two of my other favorite things beyond poo jokes: delicious food to eat and cute critters to look at.  Two of the days that we were there we lunched at Pablito's Taqueria, tucked away in a little corner of Friday Harbor.  I particularly enjoyed the goat cheese and greens empanada, coffee-braised pork taco, and the chipotle-rubbed rockfish taco, and SLB fell in love with the yam taco.  We also liked these ladies, who are on a huge poster above the salsa bar.

They may be wearing maribou pumps, but they WILL kick your taco-eating arse.

We also got dinner from Market Chef two nights in a row to eat after Olivia went to bed.  There is a reason why this humble little deli-style eatery is ranked #1 on Trip Advisor's list of Friday Harbor restaurants.  The food is delicious and the service is friendly and warm.  We became particular fans of the macaroni and cheese, barbecued shortribs, crab cakes, roasted vegetables, and beet salad, and their key lime pie is wonderful despite their assertion that they "really don't do desserts."  After wrestling Olivia into her much-hated Pack-n-Play for bed, we were grateful to Market Chef for making dinner for us.

I lost one game by forfeit because I was playing drunkenly and wasn't pleased with my lack of precision and panache.  Otherwise, rest assured that I am still SLB's Scrabblemommy.

Our last dinner on San Juan Island was a special one that miraculously took place outside of our condo.  We got brave and ordered up a babysitter from Island Sitters (Ask for Rina, who 1. was fantastic with Olivia and, 2. will totally talk shit about her friends' trashy tattoos when you stumble home from dinner tipsy and chatty) and enjoyed a lovely meal at Duck Soup Inn.  I had what is easily the most perfectly cooked salmon I've ever encountered in all my years of Northwesty salmon eating.  It was pan seared to perfection - delicately crispy on the outside and silkily yielding just beneath the brittle crust.  This was matched with a luxuriously creamy polenta, roasted corn, and pickled cucumber ribbons, and, oh my friends, what a treat it was.  I will urge you to try any savory dish on the menu, but DO NOT F* AROUND WITH DESSERT.  Go big, go bold, or go home.  SLB's hearty chocolate-banana layer cake was ironically flawless in its rustic imperfection, but my hoity-toity nectarine-buttermilk ice cream was a real disappointment.  This is a homey place, so eat homey, homies.

We didn't just eat on this trip, although that might be hard to believe from the previous paragraphs.  We spent a lot of time during the days wandering the island with Livy and seeking out beautiful views and wildlife.  The views were much easier to capture on film, but we saw and got only a few crappy pictures of DOZENS of orcas, a mama deer and her twin fawns, a harbor seal who splashed us and flirted with us from about a foot off of the dock we were walking on, alpacas at a local alpaca farm, bald eagles, and a camel named Mona who was purchased by a farmer from a petting zoo on Ebay. 

Whales!!!

After a magical and frustrating afternoon on a whale watching tour trying to capture the magesty of a pod of leaping, frolicking Orcas and their babies, it finally dawned on me that whales just don't say cheese.  So be it, whales!  I love you regardless, or maybe because of, the difficulty in photographing you!  Perhaps if you were more reliable about showing off, though, the littlest of our crew might be more impressed.

I tried pumping Livy up with tales of how we were going to be ADVENTURE LADIES! on the boat, but she didn't buy it.  Thanks to SLB for carrying the napping baby while I was an ADVENTURE LADY! by myself.

The alpacas were easier to see and understand, and so they got a better reception from Olivia.

Like big, weird dogs > like big, weird fish

Can we get one, SLB, pleeeeeeeeeeeeease?

And, finally, Livy's biggest highlight from the entire trip was the enormous soaking tub in the condo.  It was big enough for her to swim in, so one night we took an extra-splashy bath.

I think it was Hemingway who said "If you can't end with a pithy line, at least end naked."  Well said, sir. Well said, indeed.

A Little Something to Tide You Over

The lavender is blooming on San Juan Island.

We liked it so much that one of us tried desperately to eat it and twice had to have her mother fetch stalks out of her mouth (name withheld to protect privacy).

Northward, Ho!

Make that "Northward, Ho's!"

Me Show, et al, is taking a little trip to San Juan Island to visit these old friends.

And when we return, I promise to tell you all about the visit from these old friends from New York:

Mr. Weaver

Mrs. Weaver

Until then, dear readers, I'll miss you!

Whose Gym? MY GYM!

Just because you're out of shape doesn't mean you can't have wildly high self-esteem.

Me open, and me want cookie after me workout.  NOMNOMNOMNOM!

Or so says the Me Fitness Center in Portland.

The Morah, the Chicken, and other Weekend Miracles

Friends, I have introduced you to The Morah before.  She is my favorite person whom I neither birthed nor married, and this is the furthest from hyperbole as I can possibly get.  I can't overstate how much I love this lady.  The best I can do is illustrate it with a conversation I once had with Uncle Damon about her:

UD:  If you were stuck on a desert island for the rest of your life, who would you want with you?
ME:  No one.  (Like that misanthropy?  It's part of my charm.)
UD:  Could I be there?
ME:  No way.  You drive me nuts too often.
UD:  What about The Morah?
ME:  Oh!  Yeah!  That'd be great!  I love The Morah!  It'd be awesome!
UD:  What about SLB?
ME:  Maybe.

Yeah.  It's like that.  And it's even better when it's like this (notes from a visit the weekend before last):

*We shopped and bought almost everything on my clothing list in under an hour and a half, which combines my three loves: The Morah, having what I need, and not spending tons of time wandering a mall.  Brilliant!

*We had Groupon deals at Spa Willamina for massages, dry body brushings, and facials.  The spa, the services, and the practitioners are flawless.  I highly recommend it to people in Portland looking for a friendly, warm place to be rubbed into submission by strangers.

*We ate beautiful wood-fire oven-cooked pizzas at Lovely's 50-50 and followed up with housemade butterscotch ice cream.  It was wonderfully delicious and exactly what we needed after an afternoon of virtuous spa high-mindedness.  Without the substantial rib-sticking goodness of rustic pizzas and churned yolks and cream we might have floated away on a blissful bodywork cloud.

O.K., so it's NOT an excellent picture, but that is an excellent pizza.  Sauteed kale and chard with a silken yolky egg on top.  Pictures and words can't do it justice.

*A leisurely morning spent reading/internetting/staring into space in bed together with her dog, Ollie.  Her husband, the beatifically lovely Marc (seriously - I've never met a better hugger), was out of town, so we snuggled lazily under the covers with Ollie between us.

*Finally, for me a trip to the specialty lingerie shop for a few sturdy undergarments in a size "WTF???"  Tiny rib cage + mom boobs = a trip to Just Like a Woman for expensive, perfectly fitted bras.  The service is expert and kind, and the selection is incredible.  If you've got outlandish hoots like I've got outlandish hoots, I strongly recommend that you save up for a trip to Just Like a Woman.

My friend Jen calls them Circus Tits.  Just look at the baby or the dog if this makes you uncomfortable.

But all was not paradise on this trip.  We, in fact, weathered some BIG! DRAMA! with the strength and grace of a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy.  Let me explain.

See, The Morah is one of those hip urban farmers you keep reading about.  She keeps chickens in a well appointed coop in her side yard, and the coop opens up into the backyard where the chickens can run about at will.  She had just introduced three new young ladies to the flook of old friends, which apparently can be a risky proposition.  She explained to me that "pecking order" and a "pecking party" are NOT always metaphors to be pondered from behind the safety of a book.  They in fact EXIST in the chicken world, and one of the old gals was experiencing them strongly when the new babies invaded her flock.  And when we were at the spa unaware of the conflict brewing at home, the older chicken chased one of the babies into the yard, which the baby then escaped in her panic.  We had a missing chicken on our hands, night was falling, it was raining, and the mean streets of Portland (dogs, cars, and raccoons, OH MY!) are not a hospitable place for a young pullet to bed down.

So, after a mild Morah freak-out (She has feelings that she, you know, feels.  What must that be like?) she organized a search party of friends and neighbors.  We combed the streets and alleys around her house clucking "Here, chick chick chick!" softly as we tried to find the missing baby.  No luck.  After some strong self-talk about the expendableness of livestock, signs hung crying "Missing Chicken!," a post on Craigslist, and a call to animal control, by the next morning we had both given up hope.  Chickens come, and chickens go, we thought.  Best to move on.

Which, Hallmark movie-style, is exactly when a miracle occurred.  Her amazingly generous neighbor, out looking again for the chicken on his own in the morning, saw a big crow across his lawn.  Upon further inspection he found that it was not a big crow, but a small chicken!  A small, lost, lonely chicken!  He returned it to The Morah, who cried tears of relief and tenderly hugged the chicken to her maternal bosom.  She was saved!  We were relieved and amazed to find it so, but, yes!  She was saved! 

Reunited, and it feels so good!

So, with a warm and fuzzy feeling in my now properly holstered chest, I drove home.  As I was flipping radio stations, I heard the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and stopped to listen.  Usually I like this song a lot.  After all, I've sung it to so many pouting students over the years that I have a pretty close relationship with it and its message.  But all it did on my sunny, smiley drive was piss me off. 

Because no, you can't always get what you want.  Clearly.  Naturally.  I think only children and spoiled childlike adults need that message delivered via catchy tunes featuring children's choirs.  But is the best we should be aiming for really trying sometimes and just might finding that we get what we need?  Yes, it's true that this does happen.  But is it worth glorifying?  Because sometimes you find exactly what you're looking for in record time.  And sometimes you're lucky enough to get a perfect afternoon at the spa.  And sometimes your dinner is exactly what you wanted exactly when you wanted it.  And sometimes you're blessed with the financial security to afford such luxuries in a time of recession.

And sometimes you have the best friend in the world, someone who makes you seriously consider that there might be truth in the gag-inducing epithet "soul-mate."  And sometimes you're still so in love with your partner of 13 years that you get butterflies when he grabs your hand upon your arrival home from a weekend away.  And sometimes you get through a difficult pregnancy and labor to have a healthy, happy, giggling girl who makes you radically redefine love and your capacity to give it.  And sometimes, people, sometimes your chicken comes back.

I am not a religious person, but I do love the idea of miracles.  And it seems to me that they happen every day.  So, no, you can't always get what you want.  BUT SOMETIMES YOU CAN, and what a better song to sing - a song of hope and gratitude for the good in the world - than one that glorifies the possibility of mere subsistence.  Maybe it depends on luck, and certainly it depends on what you want, but I'm going to be happy to have what I have - to have what I want - while I have it.

PDA in PDX

Check out this weekend lineup:

Today -
*Drop Livy off at Oma and Opa's for the weekend.
*Drive to Portland to rendezvous with my favorite person whom I neither gave birth to nor married.
*Shop for a few hours.
*Go to the spa for a luxurious evening of strangers pummelling us.
*Eat something delicious.
*Sleep uninterrupted for an entire night.

Tomorrow-
*Drive home and reunite with SLB.
*Have a lovely meal together.
*Go to Hopscotch and sample various tasty adult beverages.
*Go home and, if I'm lucky, watch TV in my jammies without any interruption from phantom baby crying.

Sunday-
*Have breakfast with Oma and pick up Livy.
*Attempt to make it to our Lamaze class reunion.
*Have lovely portraits taken of us in douchetastic matchy-matchy outfits.

I could swoon just thinking about it.

It's going to be hard to drive with pleasure-induced narcolepsy, but I'll do my best.

So, I'll be busy this weekend.  If you need me... well, try not to need me.

Tidbits

Apologies to my loyal readers for my lengthy absence from regular posting.  I've been attending to my actual 3-D life, which sometimes interferes with the maintenance of my interweb life.  The nerve of actual people, places, and things to interrupt my screenly world of avatars and carefully edited self-representation!  For shame!

Anyhow, look at my baby:

"Waiter, I will have a martini."

My big, big girl sits up in a restaurant high chair for the first time!  She proudly took her place at the head of the table and happily banged the surface for attention any time my dining companions and I took our eyes off of her for a second.  She also enjoyed her first bites of minestrone soup broth, to which she gave two enthusiastic thumbs up.

She's fully recovered from her month of illness, and the only lingering effects are some weight loss, a nasty fake cough that she executes with a wry self-consciousness of her own great wit, and a strong desire to be permanently attached to SLB's or my body at all times.  She reminds me of those sad baby monkeys clinging desperately to their cloth mamas in Harry Harlow's awful experiments.  She's generally in good spirits, but only when accompanied by a parent.

In other highlights:

*I went to Portland for a quick overnight to visit two of my favorite ladies and get a break from my favoritest lady of all.  Livy had a great time with SLB for the weekend.  They ran a bunch of errands and, as a special daddy-daughter treat, went to the zoo together.  Everyone survived with all digits and most mental health in tact.  It was a great success!  If you're going to Portland soon, you really MUST go to Beaker and Flask.  The food is absolutely flawless.  The restaurant and the cuisine is hearty and homey with just enough perfectly-executed high class touches to justify wearing a slutty festive dress and hooker sophisticated heels.  I enjoyed a simple salad of butter lettuce in a buttermilk and tarragon dressing; the grilled beef shoulder with root vegetable gratin, celeriac puree, foie gras, and balsamic; and my partner-in-crime and I split the panna cotta with beignets and huckleberry sauce.  For drinkies Doug, our excellent bearded bartender, served up two vintage champagne glasses of "Stuck in Lodi," a cocktail made of rye whiskey, gerwutztraminer syrup, Cynar, and Peychaud's bitters.  A fine time was had by all, except for everyone in earshot who had to hear me slur my decreasingly lucid bon mots after two stiff drinks.  Portland, I trust you to forgive me!

*To continue the weekend's luxury, Livy and I went shopping in Fremont yesterday.  Our haul included fancy chocolates, a book of poetry, and art supplies.  Some of these things are gifts destined for delivery later this week.  If you receiveone, it's because Livy and I love you and thought of you during our travels!  If you don't get one, perhaps you should consider being nicer to us.  It's just a thought.  No pressure.

*Livy was well enough to go to baby swimming yesterday, where she stunned the class with her absolute relaxation in the water.  She was able to float on her back with ease supported by only one of my hands while most of the other children didn't tolerate this new skill at all.  Yeah, I got a magical baby.

Happy to be going to the pool!  Yes, there is a tiny swimsuit under those athletic sweats.

*Livy developed two new skills this weekend.  1) She now screams herself to sleep with the ferocity and volume of an enraged smoke monster, and 2) she mooshes her entire self into the juncture of between the crib wall and her mattress when she finally sleeps.  Yes, friends, she is a crack baby.

New Jack Baby

Her bedtime fits and wall-burrowing have left their mark on Livy's face in the form of tiny bruises and abrasions.  So, she won't be winning any beauty contests any time soon.  That's O.K., though.  Mama knows a lot of great places to buy tiaras, and whoever heard of earning a crown anyway?  It just defeats the purpose of being royalty.

Hoods are more comfortable anyway, Mama.  No worries.

Away We Go!

I promised a post about traveling with an infant, and here it is.  Please take any and all advice held within with an enormous grain of salt.  We have done this only once, and we have a generally magical baby who is rarely upset and is very easy to calm.  So, we had a great experience, but the odds were stacked in our favor by Olivia's easygoing demeanor.  We also could have just had lots of dumb luck, too.

I took lots of advice from Mightygirl's blog posts on traveling with children here and here, much of which came from the comments following each actual post.  If you're planning on taking your little one flying, you'd do well to at least read these over.  Her plans are so detailed that they seem daunting, at least they did to me before we left, but when put into practice they really do help.

So, without further ado, here's SLB's and my advice for flying with an infant.  Aaaaaaaaaaand GO!

1.  Get there early, but be prepared to wait.

With fears of crotch-bomber-inspired intimate glovings dancing in our heads, we arrived at least 2 hours early for both of our flights.  Then we cleared security within about 15 minutes each way and had some valuable hangout time in the Seattle and Maui airports.  This actually wasn't so bad.  Given how much extra time it takes to do everything with a baby, like bathroom trips (SLB goes while I watch the baby, I take the baby in to change her diaper, SLB watches her while I go back in to the ladies' room to wash my hands and go - at least 10 minutes JUST TO EMPTY OUR BLADDERS) and eating (she lingers over her bottles as she likes to luxuriate in the sensory pleasures of powdered, reconstituted synthetic breastmilk), these extra hours can come in handy.  I was surprised in both airports how quickly the "extra" time passed.

2.  Bring a baby carrier in addition to gate checking your stroller and/or carseat.

We have an Ergo baby carrier that we loved when Olivia was a newborn, then couldn't use because she was in between the newborn- and sturdy-baby-carrying capabilities, and now love again that she's bigger.  We stowed this in a backpack in the airport while we pushed her in her stroller before boarding the plane.  Then, on the plane, we were able to take turns holding her in her baby carrier both standing and bouncing when she was unhappy and seated while she slept on us.  This way we could keep our hands free to eat and read while she snoozed snuggled next to us.

Here's a good shot of the Ergo and me being an idiot.  "We are two mariners / our ship's sole survivors / in this belly of a whaaaaaaale!"

3.  Overpack necessities and keep them with you.

Right before we left I filled a plastic container with a few bottles' worth of "extra" formula and brought an "extra" clean bottle with us.  We used all of that formula and the additional clean bottle on the way to Maui.  I hate to think of what would have happened if I hadn't grabbed these things at the last minute or if I had tossed them in with the checked baggage.  My advice would be to keep at least a full 24 hours' worth of diapers, wipes, medicines, food, and feeding implements on you as you travel.  If you're hesitant to do this, imagine being one of the people held hostage on the tarmac by airlines.  See how much you WANT to bring those extra wipes now?  Yeah, you do.

4.  Also pack these seemingly nonessential essentials and keep them with you.

Pack extra clothing for you and your partner.  Poop, barf, and pee come easily flying out of your baby and onto your person.  You don't want to wear that all day long on the plane, and people sitting around you don't want to smell that on you all day long, either.  An extra shirt apiece ought to do it.

Additionally, remember that airplanes are FILTHY places.  I was so glad to have packed Clorox wipes in a baggie so that I could disinfect our armrests and tables before we sat down, and I was happy to have a trio of thin receiving blankets to place over the backs of our seats for Livy to touch instead of the airplane upholstery.

5.  Be nice to people.

We were extremely blessed with warm and friendly TSA agents on our way to Maui and benignly indifferent ones on the way back to Seattle.  Regardless of the reception our efforts received, we went out of our way to make processing us through security as pleasant and easy for them as possible.  I declared all suspicious materials (bottled water, bottles filled with medicine-treated filtered water for bottles, powdered formula, etc.) immediately upon arriving at the conveyor belt, and we had our system for getting all of our belongings onto and off of the belt as quickly as possible pretty down pat.  We also made it very, very clear that we had never done this before by stating it to anyone who would listen.  That way no one expected us to be very good at it, and we scored lots of extra help from sympathetic TSA moms and dads at security and gate agent moms and dads later when we were boarding the plane.

6.  Understand that TSA, although a federal agency, is not uniform among states.

Yes, it's asinine.  In Seattle the agents had no problem with me bringing baby bottles of water for formula through security.  They had some kind of exterior test they performed that proved that Livy's bottles wouldn't kill us all, performed it quickly, and had my bottles back to me before I could get my shoes back on.  In Maui the agents had NO IDEA what to do about these bottles and, after much conferring over whether to confiscate them or not, ran them through the metal detector.  Nope!  No metal in those clear bottles of water!  Thanks for checking, guys.  Now, a lesser version of myself, or perhaps just one not desperate to make traveling with an infant as easy as possible, would have launched on those jokers like SLB on a feast of cookies and bourbon.  But I was ready for the asininity, and so I was able to smile at it instead of losing my composure.  For once.

7.  Dress comfortably.

Yes, I gave up a piece of my soul when I boarded the plane in yoga pants and a hooded sweatshirt, but it was worth it.  Since I wound up spending hours strapped in a waist-buckled baby carrier and seatbelt, I'm so glad I didn't have an additional belt and buttoned waistband to negotiate.  The marsupial pouch of my sweatshirt came in handy, too, as a convenient and relatively clean receptacle for burp rags and baby toys.  I was not pretty, but I was able to withstand the discomfort of traveling with a baby strapped to me just fine.

8.  Rent baby stuff.

We rented a Pack-n-Play and an exersaucer from an independent baby-crap-rental agency instead of packing travel equivalents of her usual furniture and toys.  It was so worth it.  It set us back about $40 for the week, but saved us hours of discomfort in traveling with extra pounds of baby gear.

So, there you have it!  Be bold, friends!  Traveling with Livy took extra care and attention to detail, but I'm so glad we put forth the effort to go to travel with her instead of passing it off as too difficult to manage.  Sure, it could have been awful, and we were ready for that.  But then it wasn't.  Then it was AWESOME instead.  Huge win!

Salud!  Congratulations on your huge win, baby!