1. The entirety of your baby's nursery does not fit in the trunk of your car. But it will not stop you from trying.
2. Put pre-prepped food and milk in an easy access place that the baby CANNOT see.
3. Sitting in the backseat of the car will make you feel like a more attentive parent but it will also reinforce just how much you are torturing your baby with the trip.
4. Constant singing and talking may keep your baby from crying. It will also make you lose your voice, get carsick and drive you slowly insane.
5. It is much easier to be the driver than the passenger.
6. Pulling over to change a diaper in the backseat of the car is fine. Traveling the rest of the way with the dirty diaper sitting next to you is not.
7. Do not ask how long the baby has been sleeping. This question, no matter how quietly whispered, is the equivalent of blowing a foghorn into your baby's ear.
8. After naptime crankiness magnifies by ten with every passing mile.
9. Only a crazy person would take a baby on a road trip without a TV/DVD set-up
10. When you arrive at your destination, it will feel like you have just spent the last few hours auditioning for the role of head clown at the Hard To Please Baby Circus. You will want nothing more than to PASS OUT 'TIL MORNING. But the baby, who has just been cooped up in a carseat for five hours, has tons of other more active ideas and YOU BEST BE READY TO PLAY.
We learned when we took a road trip to a national park that was normally a 7 hour drive…it took us almost 11 hours to get there. Longest 11 hours of my life…not including labour 😉
That sounds horrible. We won’t be taking the baby in a car outside of a ten mile radius of our apartment for quite some time.
We try and start long car trips right at nap time so the baby sleeps as long as possible. Our other trick is to drive at night and leave at bed time. Both times the goal being to get as far as possible with the baby asleep!
We also do the leave at nap time approach. Bedtime sounds interesting— if we ever do this again, and I hope we DO NOT, maybe we’ll try it.
The experts tell me an iPad does the trick very nicely (and cheaply) instead of the car DVD. I have yet to try it.
Because you know, I have yet to take C out of his coop in the basement…
One addition:
The climate control in any vehicle, no matter how new or how luxury, is not adequate to fully address the needs of an infant who alternately needs nineteen layers or nakedness to accommodate the shift in core body temperature associated with sleeping/crying/howling/flinging/singing/pointing activities.
You may be a crap mom but at least you get points for consistency!
Is that why she was so upset? Did I overheat her? Boy, I really have no idea what I’m doing.