Road Tripping

June’s been a busy month for us!  We had our first road trip the weekend before last–we traveled to my parents’ for a long weekend for a cousin’s wedding.  The trip is 9 hours one way.

In my post about extended rear-facing, I mentioned our dilemma about turning Meghan around in her car seat. Many of you thought she looked super squished and thought we should go ahead and turn her around, put prefaced your opinions with the idea that I should follow my mommy instincts.

I did follow my mommy instincts, and I couldn’t come up with a good reason to turn her around.  She’d never complained; she’s a good car rider.  Tim and talked about it and made the choice to keep her rear-facing until there was a more compelling reason to turn her around.  Her safety needs to be the biggest factor in our decision making, and clearly rear-facing is the safer choice.

We decided if she gave us problems rear-facing, we would turn her around mid-trip, but she could not have been better behaved.  She was an absolute angel.  There was no whining, no crying, and only minimal entertainment from Mommy or electronic means needed.  She read her books, played with her animals, colored, looked out the windows, and napped.  Win.  She stayed rear-facing for trip #1.

We got home on a Monday evening and were slated to leave again Thursday, this time for a trip to visit Tim’s family and attend his grandmother’s 90th birthday party.  This trip is a total of 12 hours, but we break it into two days.

Right at the beginning I knew this trip wouldn’t be like the first.  We’d been traveling maybe 10 minutes when I heard Meghan chirp,

“Okay, time to see Nana and Poppy!”

I knew another long trip so close to the first was going to be difficult.

Overall, she wasn’t terrible, just not as easy as the first trip.  When nap time rolled around, however, it seemed she’d just about reached her limit.

She was whining, “Time to get out.  Time to get out!”

And whining.  And whining.  And whining.  Definitely not sleeping.

Finally, we decided to turn her around.  I didn’t know if it would help or not, but thought I would give it a try.  Her first words were when she was forward-facing were,

“This is fun.  Driving is fun.”  Not kidding.

She happily looked around for a while, and then fell into sweet sleep without the accompanying whining.  Yay.

While she did get restless during moments at the rest of the trip, having her forward-facing was definitely easier for everyone.  When she was rear-facing, I had to jump in the back seat anytime she needed  something (like an animal she dropped or a drink of water) and of course that isn’t safe for me.  With her forward-facing, it’s so nice to turn around and see her face and have access to her without having to jump in the back.

I still have mixed feelings about making the decision based on her behavior, but now that we’ve turned her around I think it would be difficult for her to go back to rear-facing.

Although the first thing she does when she gets in her seat now is put her feet up on the seat, so I think she liked having something to prop her dogs up on.

Today we took a ride over to Poppy’s golf club for lunch.  Meghan feels like such a big girl sitting forward.

It’s a beautiful day and we had a relaxing lunch on the patio.

Afterwards Meghan was lucky enough to get a golf lesson from Poppy.

Does she look like a serious golfer or what?

The rest of the week will include more fun times with Nana and Poppy.

I might even get a chance to sneak into the kitchen for some recipe experimentation.  Stay tuned.