Best. Baby. Ever. and weekend #3

Before I get back to the third weekend for the wedding(s), I just have to say that Kiren slept 10 hours last night -- from 8ish to 6ish -- WOW! Unfortunately, I woke up at 5ish because I was uncomfortable (he usually eats well before then, and my body had a lot of extra milk). Oh well, since I went to bed at about 10, that was still a seven hour sleep for me, easily the best since he arrived four months ago. To top it off, I kept him up for about 30 minutes after he ate, while I pumped away the extra milk, and then he went back to bed at 7 for a 2.5 hour nap, and I slept for most of that too. Yay!! I feel pretty darn good today.

Oh and as a note to my future self if we ever do this baby thing again, I think the long sleep is because we are double swaddling him. In the past couple of weeks, he has been compulsively rolling from his back to his tummy. He doesn't remember that a few weeks before, he learned to roll from his tummy to his back, so he gets stuck on his tummy. He only likes his tummy for about 5 to 10 minutes, and it certainly is not a sleeping position for him. Compound that with the fact that our Miracle Blanket is simply too small for our big boy, so he is fighting out of the blanket, rolling around, etc; he just can't be still to go to sleep. The second blanket helps contain the first blanket, so he's sleeping better. Well, that's one theory anyway. Another theory is that we hit the magic four month mark that everyone said is when it will get better (which seemed really, really far off when he was a week old, so it wasn't much consolation at the time!), and it was nothing that we actually did. Finally, the whole thing could have been a fluke, a one-night-only event. I hope it is not the last one, but who knows. We'll just have to see.

Now, back to the wedding weekend. Vivek's first cousin was the groom, so many relatives descended upon NJ for the event. In fact, many of them stayed with us at Vivek's parents house, which was fun and a bit wild too, especially since it included my two MI nephews, a 2.5-year-old and a one-year-old.

We flew out Thursday afternoon, the 30th, and it was Kiren's worst flight by far (I know that you might be saying, hmm, he's too young to have flown much, but with trips to AR and CO under his belt, he really has had four flights before this one). He was not crying really, but doing his "fun" pterodactyl screams/screeches, which I am sure were quite a hit with the folks around us. We know how to fix it -- get up and bounce him -- but the seatbelt sign was on for most of the flight, so that quiver in our arsenal was not available. Luckily, it is a fairly quick flight to NY, so it wasn't too bad.

The rest of the weekend was a whirlwind of family members meeting Kiren for the first time, which must have been quite a bit of over-stimulation for him. New people were constantly sticking their faces in his -- and, in a bit of irony, even mentioning how overstimulating that must be while doing it themselves! There was a Hindu wedding on Saturday morning, and Kiren did quite well at that one and looked quite dashing in his Indian clothes that his Thathi, a.k.a. Kiren's grandma and Vivek's mom, got for him in India. However, on Sunday evening, there was a interfaith ceremony complete with dinner and dancing. He was fine during the actual wedding (not quiet, exactly, but definitely not crying -- just talking some, so Vivek was standing up with him in the back), but he was pretty unhappy during the reception. He was actually asleep early on, but then the loud clapping and woohoos after the first toast woke him up. That meant he was fussing during subsequent toasts, and wouldn't you know we were in a corner unable to escape without walking in front of the people giving the speeches. Later in the evening, we ended up putting him in our ergo carrier and dancing around the dance floor with him some. And then we left early, but we probably should have left even earlier if we were actually responding to Kiren's cues. Once we made it back to Vivek's parents house, he had a brief meltdown of red faced crying (that we deserved for keeping him up so long), and then he finally slept.

Unfortunately, after all the "trauma" of the night before, we had to wake him up to make our early morning plane back to MI, but he was great on that flight because he slept for almost all of it. And in a first for me, I got some digits on the plane. Yup, that's right, I picked up a family. There was a mom in front of us with a 5-month-old, and her husband and two older children (5 and 7) were sitting across the aisle. They live in Ann Arbor, and since we haven't really met anyone that close to Kiren's age, and they hadn't met anyone with kids their 5-month-old's age, we exchanged numbers.

To top off the weekend, we went to the annual faculty Labor Day picnic for dinner. It is great to see the faculty with their families, and the picnic always has cool stuff for kids to do. This year they had pony rides and a petting zoo, which was lost on our little guy, but will be fun in future years. Although last year, they had a clown, and one of our friends said her son was scared of it. That makes sense to me, so I hope they'll just bring back the animals next year.