Road tripping with Baby

My choices were:
1. Camp in the depths of the Amazon with raw meat strapped to my body
2. Redecorate Martha Stewart's house for her
3. Take a road trip with a 3 1/2-month-old
4. Stay home and dust

I chose #3, mostly because I knew I had a good friend, Sara, waiting at the end of the 250-mile journey.

On Friday, I loaded up my station wagon (with Matt's help), bundled Kalina into her carseat and raced my little one's patience to South Carolina. Matt looked concerned as I was pulling out of the driveway. Did he know what I had in store?

I was proud for having bought a mirror to attach to the backseat so I could see Kalina and she could coo back and forth to the baby inside it during the trip. It promptly fell off as I pulled out of the driveway, so I can only assume Kalina drifted off to sleep for the next hour and a half.

The temptation to speed when you have a sleeping, yet volatile, infant in your backseat is astounding. Every mile you check off while Baby is in dreamland is one more you won't have to drive while listening to the sounds of backseat screaming. To cancel out the negative effects of speeding on safety, I'm hoping for a Baby on Board sign for Christmas.

Our first stop took a full hour. Kalina was thrilled to be out of the car, and comforted to see that the gas station/restaurant we stopped at had a ceiling fan she could make friends with. While I ate lunch, she sat on my lap and contentedly chatted with it, a little sad when it was time to leave. In fact, I mentally planned to have one installed above her carseat when we got home. I re-adjusted the mirror, which then fell off again by the time I'd merged back onto the interstate.

One trick I've learned when driving around with Kalina is that it helps to have a pacifier (or 10) in my purse, so that if hers falls out I can put a new one in without digging around in the carseat for the old one (all while driving, of course). In theory, she could literally end up covered with pacifiers in the course of a trip this big. Thanks to this tactic, she once again fell asleep.

Only temporarily. This is when things got tough for both of us, the problem being that in her heart of hearts, Kalina really just wants to be held 100% of the time. Her tolerance for not being held decreases as the day wears on.

So when she awoke and started to cry, as Matt warned me she would at some point, I had to choose: press on with an angry baby or stop for half an hour trying to trick her into being okay with her carseat again. Always an optimist, I stopped.

Kalina's nobody's fool, however. Soon after we pulled back onto the interstate (mirror, once again, having slid off), she realized something wasn't going the way she'd planned, and said so (I use "said" loosely here). We kept going. She let me win this time and settled in for another nap.

One more meltdown later (Kalina's), we arrived. Whew. Good thing I'll never have to do that again. Oh, wait...

Fortunately, Kalina was a pro at the whole carseat business on the way home and the trip was too uneventful to write about, except for the fact that it being uneventful is something to shout to the world. The mirror, by the way, was a pro as well and I spent probably far too much of the drive happily watching Kalina sleep.

Photo: Kalina and I enjoying mini donuts at the South Carolina State Fair (as you can see, she politely declined)