First Road Trip

For Harper's 6th week we decided to take a road trip to Salt Lake City. Joe had a conference to attend here for work, and Harper and I came along for a change of scenery. We drove as far as Green River, UT the first day. Harper did really well in her car seat--almost too well. She would have slept the entire 8 hours if we hadn't stopped to wake her up enough to eat every 3 hours. This made the car ride pretty smooth, but made the first night pretty terrible, since Harper decided to be awake all night after sleeping all day. I think she slept for about 25 minutes total, which means that's all that we slept, too.

We got an early start the first morning because we weren't sleeping anyway, and because the entire town of Green River had a planned power outage from 6am to 9:30am. Let me just say that without a fan and AC, a hotel room in a cheap Holiday Inn gets very stuffy--and very loud, since you realize just how thin all the walls are when there's no background noise to distract you. Anyway, we were in Salt Lake City by mid-afternoon, where we caught a nap and then went out to dinner at Squatters brew pup. Harper slept through her first brew pup experience, too. I think lots of noise and people just knock her out.

The last few days we've been staying at the Little America hotel, where Joe's conference is. We had another rough night the first night here, but since then we've tried many different things--adding more padding to Harper's travel crib, turning up the temperature in the room, putting her crib in different locations, swaddling her in different blankets, feeding her later at night, keeping her up during the day--and while I can't say exactly what worked, some combination of the changes seems to make a difference, because she finally slept for four hours straight last night.

Part of the new strategy to keep her awake is a play mat that I bought at a used kids' store here. In just the last few days Harper has clearly been able to see much better, and she spends nearly all her limited awake time staring very intently at objects, especially lights and windows. Monday she just stared at me for five minutes before fussing for the next fifteen, and I finally got the idea that I was no longer interesting enough to keep her entertained: the poor kid was bored silly. So I found a used kids' store online and bought this mat, and now she plays on it until she's so tired she just falls asleep (meaning this thing is God's gift to parents).


Once asleep, she still prefers our king size bed to her travel crib. Hopefully this isn't an early indication of a preference for the luxurious life...



Joe's conference ends this afternoon, so we've got one more night in SLC before we head home via Dinosaur National Monument. Joe's really hoping we can get in some kind of hike there, but I've been pretty skeptical of our chances to see much. However, we took Harper on a walk up at Alta yesterday evening with Dad carrying her in the Baby Bjorn and she did well, so maybe the hike will happen after all.