Last week, Bart and I braved a 1,000-mile (one-way) road trip with Hudson to go visit family in Arkansas. It’s a trek we know very well, but never in ten years of marriage have we attempted it with a baby, so we didn’t know what what to expect. Despite some pitfalls here and there, we are thankful it went smoothly, and we were glad to be with family for Christmas.
All our friends told us to put the kid in the car at bedtime and go, as the kid is used to sleeping at that time and will do a serious stretch of snoozing while you make lots of time. So we decided to leave Friday evening and see how far we got, either stopping late at a hotel or driving the whole way through. Imagine our despair when our normally awesome nighttime sleeper woke up every single time we stopped. Plus, he’s generally a nap fighter, so getting him back to sleep while in the car seat sadly involved a lot of decibels on his part. We opted to drive the whole way through instead of figuring out a hotel with a dog and baby, but it was rough going with me in the backseat pumping every few hours and trying to convince Hudson to go back to sleep.
However, once we made it and we all three got caught up with sleep after a day or so, Hudson was awesome during our time with family. He slept pretty well in strange rooms and tolerated being passed around from family member to family member. He even got on central time without skipping a beat.
On the trip home, we opted to drive it in two days, so no overnights and at least some rest in a hotel along the way. We also left Murphy with my parents; he will be riding back here with them next week when they come visit us. That helped remove some of our trepidation about stopping in a hotel, but it was still challenging enough with a baby. He did well, though, staying mostly quiet even though he woke up more than usual. The car time during the day was okay; he took wonderfully long naps but was a real pill when he was trying to avoid sleep. Plenty of rest stops to get him out of his car seat and lots of verses of silly car trip songs helped distract him from being stuck in the car.
As far as our visit, it was great to see family on both sides. Hudson got to see aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and great-grand parents, which was our ultimate goal. We had about four different Christmas celebrations in three towns and stayed with both my parents and Bart’s parents. We wish we could have stayed longer, but it was good to get back to normal and settle in before the new year.
After a couple of days home, we all seem to be relatively well recovered. We don’t have any more long road trips planned in our near future, but we are glad our trips to the Outer Banks and to Arkansas went well with Hudson. Since we tend to be fairly big travelers, we hope to introduce Hudson to it early so he is used to it when he’s older.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and were able to spend time with friends and family. Our best wishes for a new year, and I’ll see you in 2016!
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