Underwater selfie!

Here are two videos of my turtle, which show him swimming happily through the water.

I had the camera out, while I was testing the underwater housing so I took some photos of my baby while she was there.

I wants!!

And then these bonus photos from Feb 1st, which only just appeared in WordPress! We were in the kids store and Miranda tried these sunglasses on her. 😛 The spoon is from the shave ice we had (not Ava) a few minutes earlier.

I decided I need to put the dates in the title, otherwise I’m going to get confused.

On the other hand, as I went to write about yesterday I realized we didn’t do much yesterday.

Walmart again, because we needed some things. Miranda asked me like 6 times if I truly needed a $6 meat thermometer, and I said yes, I need it. Went down to the water again and I found a turtle (photos and/or video in a separate post).

I’ll leave this here and go find some photos for you folks. 🙂

Our days are weird. At home, we don’t have big swingy days. Here, every few hours we swing between terrible and wonderful. Or rather, our daughter swings between the two and we swing along behind her.

After she slept in the morning, we sat and played and went out to the beach, which is about 20m away from our balcony, or about 40m away from our front door. Miranda and I sat on the sand and sat with Ava while she looked around. Miranda stood in the water, then I stood in the water, then Ava and I stood in the water. Our goal is slow progression towards actually having her in the water. Perhaps we’re being to cautious, but the nice thing about having so much time here is that we can afford to be cautious in a way that 2 weeks might not allow.

Her second nap she screamed whenever we left her alone. It’s a scream of fear, and it wrenches at your insides and makes you need to make the terror go away however you can. I had planned to go grocery shopping after she went down, and mid-way through the process Miranda said I should go now. I was thankful, and guilty. Apparently she slept after 30 minutes of that, a small blessing.

I went to the local grocery store and bought a bunch of staple foods for making dinner. We’d stopped at Walmart on our way into town, but needed a bit more. Then I stopped at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck to bring lunch home.

Giovanni’s is an institution in the area. Shrimp trucks are BIG business, this isn’t some sleepy little indy restaurant trying to make it work, there are stories about terrible politics between the trucks. And I’m sure that the other trucks are just as good, since it’s literally just rice, garlic and shrimp assembled in a pleasing manner, but we just keep going to Giovanni’s because it was our first. I skipped the garlic — I plan on eating it at some point, but didn’t feel like blowing a gasket.

Standing in line, there’s about 20 people in front of people at 11am when they open. I’m checking Facebook and my news feed like I have all the time in the world. I finish my feed and look up and see a sign of cold dread CASH ONLY. I have no cash. Here’s a photo of the line behind me. If I go out for garlic shrimp and come back empty-handed while she dealt with an angry baby, Miranda would be pissed!!

This is a good time to mention that if the photo looks terrible, it’s because it was taken with my phone. My camera screen is cracked and has dust in it.

I quickly google’d an ATM, found one, asked the people behind me if they could save my spot (although if they were gone by the time I got back, obviously I would lose it) and took off sprinting. I was gone less than 10 minutes and when I got back, those people were 1 spot from the front of the line. We laughed, I breathed and ordered. ,

I got home, we ate and commiserated about putting Ava to sleep. She woke up, and we went back to the water and I went snorkeling while the two of them sat on the beach and played in Ava’s new beach tent.

The snorkeling in this area is better than I remember it. Lots of scattered little fish, which was nice. But not much in the way of interesting rocks or formations or plant life.

We went in, and I put Ava to sleep and she went right to bed. I asked Miranda why she had such a hard time, and she politely, and with a smile, requested that I come closer to her. I declined, it was a trap.

After she woke, we took a drive into Hale’iwa for Miranda. Retail therapy does solve a lot of problems. We bought shave ice with ice cream and condensed milk! Ava made friends throughout the town. I had her on my back and people kept saying “Oh, there’s a baby!” We avoided buying anything except the ice…until we got to the childrens store.

I have a theory, and it will make sense  those of you with expensive hobbies. Warhammer, for example. It’s easy for me to stop buying Warhammer, because it’s hard to justify some days – I won’t use that model even though it’s cool, I’ve got other things to paint, I don’t play that game, etc. For babies though, she’s like this really expensive hobby that you can always say “this is adorable! we’ll totally use it!” We spent a lot of money in that store. I bought 2 books, one of them has new Hawaii-based words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which is my favourite lullaby on Ava’s behalf.

At home, it was time for her bed. Miranda had a theory that I would be able to put her to bed easier – I had put her down for both easy naps. Unfortunately, it was not to be and I had a 40 minutes ordeal of putting her down. It wasn’t as screamy as earlier in the day, but she wasn’t sleeping and I had more work to do than usual.

We finished off the day with some computer and Survivor time, and off to sleep.

So many thoughts with which to start.

Because we’re attached to the apartment while Ava is asleep, I should have lots of time to write. I don’t know what I’m doing while Ava is asleep, when I’m at home, which I’m replacing with writing. Video games? I think so.

I went to bed at 10:40PST last night. The number is important. My mind remembers numbers very well. I was awakened at 10:40 by a child so sad and terrified that no amount of consoling would appease her. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I’d gone to bed at 10:40 and now it was 10:40 – I had slept. Hadn’t I? Confusion set in with the siren around me, and my world needed context in order to make sense of it.

Slowly, in between shhhh’s and “it’s ok sweety” and her horrible shuddering and sobbing, I pieced timezones together and knew that I had slept for 2 hours. Time made sense again, and Ava calmed down and became happy again. Would she sleep? Or would she start crying again once she was put back into the crib?

The crib is in our bedroom. Miranda brilliantly moved her head to the other end of the bed so they could see each other, and made calming noises. It seemed to work, so everyone got back to sleep. That was a harrowing time, and unlike my calm faith of Wednesday that everything would be ok, it shook me to think that everything might not be ok.

5:20am we’re woken up. But it’s ok, because that’s Hawaii time which is 7:20am PST, which is when she usually wakes up. She’s happy.

We organize a few things, leaving her to play on the same mat as last night, and she doesn’t wail when Miranda is in the bedroom and I walk away. Small victories.

At 7am, I take her into the bedroom and give her a little bottle and put her in the crib. I stand there a moment while she doesn’t cry. I walk out and close the door. No crying, just sucking on her hand. I walk into the living room and declare, if not success, at least a temporary truce. Minutes later Miranda checks, and she’s asleep. One more little brick on the road to success.

Re-reading from yesterday, I forgot to mention that Miranda eventually did find our hiking carrier. 🙂

Here’s 4 photos from yesterday! Miranda had sent them before she went to bed, but they didn’t arrive before I went to sleep.

Sitting on the floor in the airport.

I’m telling her about what she’s looking at – the man walking with the little flagging sticks, the other planes, the cones, the stairs and walkways.

She looks content in this photo, in her little nest and her shows. But this is in the middle of trying to get her to sleep, and very shortly she starts to lose her shit, and shortly after that we get into screaming territory.

I’m told I’ve been to Hawaii 5 times, so this is Hawaii #5.

Our day started at 11pm on Day -1, because it affected the rest of the day. Neither of us really managed to get very much sleep, so much so that we were quizzing each other in bed at 11 about things that had or hadn’t made it into the suitcases we’d spent all day packing. Sleep did not come easy.

5:30 was the planned wake-up time, but I made the mistake of using the washroom at 4am and dozed until 5am when I couldn’t stand being in bed and awake anymore. Miranda followed me shortly after. Ava slept.

We did a little last minute packing, stuffed some electronics and toiletries and pills into suitcases, weighed the suitcases and panicked over how to get each suitcase less than 50lbs and ended up packing another backpack. I ate and took a shower (neither of which Miranda wanted to do), while Miranda fed Ava and then we got a cab to YVR.

YVR was a breeze. When you have a happy baby sitting on your back, people want to help you. They just look into her darling blue eyes and wide, open, smile and they open gates and fail to check the weight of the suitcases you so carefully managed. (we were annoyed we could have fit more into each!!). M and I have Nexus, but we’d totally forgotten to get Ava hers, so we were worried about jumping into the Nexus line at the airport. No problem though — they have a special Family line up for security.

We sat down at the gate, lay out a mat and played and read and waited.

The airplane was on time and our flight attendants were superb. WestJet continues to hire the best!

Ava had no troubles ascending, and went from happy, to super loud and cranky to asleep within minutes. It was a little eerie, actually – one second she’s pissed as hell, and the next second she’s silent. We used a phone camera on selfie mode to check her eyes, and passed out. I was carrying her in the Tula, so I was careful about breathing for the next hour.

She woke, happy and alert. We played and she made faces and charmed all our neighbours. No one said anything, but I worry that they might have changed their mind before the end of the flight. This nap cycle was not good. At this point, she’d been woken up 2 hours early, been awake for 3 hours (usually only 1.5), slept for 1 (usually 1.5) and then was awake for 3 more hours and just couldn’t get comfortable. She wailed really badly for somewhere near 10 minutes and we couldn’t figure out how to sooth her. This was really draining on both of us, but eventually Miranda found something that worked and Ava allowed it to work, and suddenly Miranda had a locked-out elbow with a baby lying in it. Not comfortable at all for her. >.< We slowly re-positioned until it worked for both.

About 20 minutes later, Ava woke up and vomited about 100-130ml of formula all over Miranda, and a little on me. We were stunned. She just woke up and became a waterfall.

For context, Ava doesn’t vomit. Sometimes she’ll spit up a bit, but really no more liquid than you’d find if you spat into the sink (don’t spit anywhere else, that’s gross). So this really was a weird situation for us. First flight, first time emptying her stomach contents onto one of us. We grabbed the barf bag, dumped some of it in there, stripped her clothing, tried to wipe us down and she was so ridiculously happy. Like, so happy. And naked.

Miranda had so much on her that she couldn’t get clean, and our area smelled like stomach acid and formula for the rest of the flight. Mixed in sometimes with farts, since she did that a lot too.

So happy.

We’d read that descending in an airplane was the worst for babies, because, well, you know. I had a plan to counter act this, and whether it was necessary or not, I’m happy to report that descending was fine. I had a 180ml of formula for Ava. Whenever my ears started to feel pressure, I would give her 10-20 sucks on the bottle, then clear my own ears. Rinse and repeat until you’re on the ground. She didn’t cry – neither about the ears, nor the fact that I kept taking her bottle away.

Landed in Honolulu. Miranda waited for the bags while I got on a shuttle to get our rental car. I didn’t truly know how I was going to get back to the airport, but I figured I’d figure it out. The shuttle driver asks “car seat — where’s the baby?!”. He’s this loud and blustery black dude. Pretty stereotyped, I’m sure you can imagine him. I said she was back with my wife, and he asked if I knew how to get back? It was only after that I realized that this mans profession was literally “getting back to the airport from the car rental place” (and vice versa). He said “it’s simple — right right left right” and I memorized that, with absolutely no context. 5 minutes later he calls me to the front of the packed bus and shows me what he means, and it all falls into place.

I had no troubles picking up the car, did my right right left right, found Ava and Miranda at the curbside happily. Apparently there was an issue in while I was gone whereby our hiking backpack wasn’t with them, and the conveyor had stopped.

We quickly got on the highway and drove to Mililani, a good sized town in the middle of Oahu. We had planned to stop at Walmart for a few essential items to get us going — diapers, wipes, bread, eggs, bacon, a papaya, etc. Ava hadn’t slept since she had woken from puking at this point, about 3 hours.

3 hours is usually how long we have her awake before she goes to sleep. We think (without proof) that the secret to our happy child is that she gets a good amount of sleep, and since we really like our happy child, we’re pretty obsessed with making sure she sleeps. 3 hours and we’re at Walmart and she’s showing no signs.

At almost 4 hours we leave Walmart, still not sleeping.

We get to our apartment at something like 4.5 hours and she’s mercifully asleep. Except now we have a sleeping baby and have to lug our shit upstairs …and her? Heck no. I sit in the car for 15 minutes rather than waking her up. I don’t want to look up the numbers, but at this point she’s slept for something like 7 hours, where she usually has more like 11-13 hours.

The apartment is lovely. It’s nearly everything you want from a Hawaii apartment (no dishwasher). We sit Ava down and put some toys around her and start unpacking and…we hear a scream from the living room. She’s sitting up in the middle of it, and it seems that we can’t leave her alone anymore. This is a thing we can do at home. Sometimes in rare occasions she’ll be looking right at you, with intention, and if you leave her eye sight while keeping eye contact, she’ll cry and be mollified when you come back. This was every time we tried to leave.

But, at least when we were with her, she was super happy. So I sit and play, or sit on the deck and look at the water.

Time for bed finally. Miranda goes to put her down as usual, we have a little routine. About 10 minutes in, Miranda calls out my name and asks me to take over. It seems that Ava had been crying in the dark room when Miranda would even walk away from the crib, while still being in the room. I try to sooth Ava, and don’t succeed.

It’s been a long day of unknown behavior from our happy kid, and this is pretty rough to deal with. We talk it out, because that’s what Miranda and I are really good at, and we come up with a plan. Who knows if the plan will work, but any plan is better than no plan!

<grrrrr>

I wrote a bunch then published it then WordPress decided to get me to login again and then deleted everything after this. It wasn’t a lot, but it’s gone and grr.

It’s 10:44 Vancouver time and I’m pretty wired.

I have only 2 photos for you. My camera phone is terrible. Miranda was going to send me some photos from her awesome camera phone, but I think she probably lay down in bed and passed out before they got out. Ah well, tomorrow!

We were hoping she would sleep in the airport, because it was about time. At the same time, we would probably have needed to wake her up to get on the plane anyway, so it’s probably just as well.

Me sitting in the car at the end of the day waiting for her to wake up.

Later!

We got married! Then we went to Hawaii for our honeymoon and here’s some photos! This’ll be a lot less written than some of my other posts, because I really don’t feel like writing a lot.