Departures

It seems like every half a year or so we pack up one household in a crazy rushed effort to stash our belongings somewhere, all in order to go to another household. That's what we did last weekend. We have subletters living in our apartment this summer, so we had to find unobtrusive corners of our place to stick things and then move boxes and suitcases to M's office and the home of our longsuffering friends, leaving the apartment scrubbed of too-personal items.

And then we will get to the other place (which has been similarly sublet), and face the task of unpacking the same kind of too-personal items that we stored at M's grandmother's house and in our pint-sized second bedroom. (Pint-sized is the right size for a baby! And we have one of those! But it's full to the ceiling of random crap that a closetless apartment is bound to accumulate, plus all that stored clothing, PLUS a ton of stuff from our previous Brussels-Barcelona move.)

So. After packing up, which was accomplished in due time, we drove for twelve hours with an eleven-week-old baby. This went much more smoothly than I had feared, with the crying jags limited to easily-fixable episodes: hungry! wet! So we would: stop car at nearest rest area/ gas station (ideally coinciding with our need to eat, pee, or fuel up, but not always), feed and/or change the baby, get back on the road. He is now marginally distractable with jangly toys, so M. jangled some toys in front of him every once in a while and that helped.

And now we're in our nation's capital! Happy to be at my parents' apartment, although I think M. will be happier when grading is finished. We spend a week here, then a week in Boston (which means, yes, another long car ride), and then off to Barcelona.

In the midst of all of this, Gabriel has decided that sleeping through the night agrees with him. We went from waking up every. two. hours. like clockwork to sleeping for five hours at a time, say, from 10 to 3 and from 3 to 8 (no transition nights of three or four hour stretches, which is strange). It's like he's growing up or something! It's like I have a new non-fogged brain!

We went to the national zoo yesterday. Zoos always make me a little sad for the animals in their enclosures and cages, but also fascinated by these gorgeous creatures that I would never otherwise see so up close. Gabriel slept through the whole thing, pretty much, and when he was awake, his hands were way more interesting to him than lions or pandas. He's just discovered that there are these objects stuck on the end of his appendages that he can move back and forth and this requires intense scrutiny. I'm sure he'll have a detailed report on my desk in the morning.

And speaking of tomorrow morning: I turn 32! Which is basically the same as 31, so it's not too big of a deal. But then again, it's so not the same, because now I have a baby, and if that doesn't blow my mind... Convenient that it's Mother's Day one day later. It took me several weeks of seeing Mother's Day advertisements and store displays and thinking about my own mom before I realized that Oh! This applies to me now! I'm a mom. Wow.