So yesterday and this evening, I was in the living room and looked up and asked Dan, “What happened to Desmond’s diaper?” His response both times has been “Huh?”. In other words short stuff has started taking off his diaper, which won’t be a big deal, except they are snap diapers, we know he can and does (loves to in fact) take off velcro diapers, which is why we only use the snap ones now. Apparently he is starting to figure them out too. I am hoping it doesn’t happen to often because I really do like him in a diaper, it just feels safer somehow, since he does not seem at all ready to potty train yet.

So Desmond is napping right now, and I got a few pictures of him doing so. So here are a couple of pictures from today of Desmond napping in his bed. I’ll post some more on India in a day or three. Desmond has decided not to go to bed till 10 or 11pm at the moment which makes the evening challenging. On the plus side he’s cut down on the quantity of food he’s eating, though not a lot.

So on our first full day there, Desmond got up ridiculously early as noted, fortunately we didn’t have much planned for the day. My Mother in Law and I went out shopping with one of Dan’s cousins and bought fabric and such for making sulvar kameses (spelling is probably off), but other then that we didn’t do much. Desmond did explore some and get to play with someone’s keys, other then that though it was a low key day.

You can see how exhausted he is in this picture. He definitely suffered from jet lag on the trip.

The morning of day three Desmond again woke up really early around 3am or so. Unfortunately it was not another low key day, it was the first day of traveling and visiting relatives. Now I am glad we got to see all Dan’s aunts and uncles and their families, but it would have been so much better if we had had another 2 days or so downtime before we started making the rounds, or if we had visited one house a day instead of 2 to 3. Desmond would fall asleep in one house and wake in a new one, it was a bit disorienting. We had a rented taxi/car with a driver for the day, no car seat again. Desmond did enjoy wandering the car though.

We first visited Dan’s uncle who also lives in New Delhi, his Aunt passed away a couple of years ago, maybe a year or so after our last visit. Desmond had fun playing at the house and Dan’s cousin’s daughter had a son who was just about Desmond’s age which was nice, though he went down for a nap not to long into our visit, which Desmond tried to do as well but wasn’t quite able to fall asleep with everyone around. I do not remember names of the people in the photos, but the first one is Desmond with his Dada and Dan’s Uncle. The second is him hugging his “cousin”.

He did quickly fall asleep in the car once we’d left though.

We then drove about an hour to Dan’s Boua (spelling? Aunt) Brahmi’s house. Unfortunately this aunt had also passed away, but her son and daughter in law and their two sons live at the house. This is where I was able to use their computer to get online and update the blog and e-mail people. Both the sons speak very good English which is nice, since neither Dan or I speak Hindi. Desmond did wake shortly while we were here, just about long enough to have a glass of Fanta and I think he may have eaten a cookie or two, but can’t remember before falling right back asleep. He really wasn’t a huge fan of Fanta.

He then slept through the rest of the visit and when we got in the car he slept all the way to our next and final stop for the day/evening.

We finished off the day at Dan’s Uncle and Aunt’s house. His Uncle had passed away since our last visit as well (yes it was a bit depressing visiting three houses of relatives where the directly related one had passed on). It was nice to get to our final destination for the evening though. Because of his nap Desmond did stay up for awhile that evening and he got to eat chocolate ice cream which he was quite happy about. He was less happy about us confining him to the bedroom we were in, but the main room has a fairly steep staircase and we didn’t want to watch him every second to make sure he wasn’t climbing up and down them (like he enjoys). It was a fairly exhausting day especially after having been up so early thanks to Desmond’s jet lag.

I was just having an e-mail discussion with my Mom which reminded me of a post I wanted to make. Why did no one mention that 19 month olds can eat more then everyone else in the house combined? Seriously the boy is packing away the food, I am really hoping it is a growth spurt because he is eating a ton.

For instance this morning till he took his nap at 11am he had:

2 bowls of pasta with cheese
a small red wax cheese
a bowl of blueberries
a bowl of pineapple
a granola bar
a bowl of raspberries
a tortilla shell
milk
2 small pieces of peppermint bark
a scoop of peppermint ice cream

Now the dog gets some of this, but not as much as one would expect and that is just this morning, the past two mornings he’s eaten more then this list. My mornings consist of him taking me to the fridge every 20 minutes or so to get him something else to eat. To be fair he does slow down some in the afternoon, but he still eats a fair amount then as well.

I am really hoping for another growth spurt even though he just had one a month ago or so, because he is raising our grocery bills all by himself.

So we arrived in India around 4pm Indian time the day after we left the US (was around 7/8am our time). We got there and took a Taxi to Dan’s Aunt and Uncle’s house in New Delhi. Unfortunately no seatbelts so no car seat, and I really was not happy the whole trip with Desmond not in a car seat, it was very scary. Anyways Desmond was exhausted and stood and sat with his Dada (Grandpa) most of the trip to the house. He did sleep some, but not a lot since there was so much to do and see.

Once we got to the house, we had dinner and visited with various relatives. Desmond went down around 9pm or so Indian time and Dan and I followed shortly after, which was a good thing. Around 2:30am Desmond woke up for the day starving and ready to go. We tried to get him back down but it wasn’t happening, so we fed him and gave him the iPod so he could watch My Friends Tigger and Pooh while we attempted to at least half sleep for a bit. It made for a very tired Sarah and Dan the next day. Here is Desmond enjoying his early morning wake up.

Oh and thank you Mom for the little fake mp3 player you got him for the trip, he didn’t really use the player much but those headphones were wonderful since they were just the right size for him and worked with the iPods.

Okay so anyone who didn’t see me buying the baby new clothes as soon as I knew gender raise your hand. Anyone? That’s what I thought. So we went out after dinner last night and picked up 2 new outfits for the baby. Amusingly enough neither of them is pink. Here are the baby’s new outfits. I really like both of them especially the Winnie the Pooh one.

I really like the blue fairy princess one too, it is cute.

And her Winnie the Pooh Dress!

We had our ultrasound today, and the baby is looking good! It is also a little girl! Now to think about names, eek!

So we started our trip on Monday October 20th, we headed out of the house around 7:30am and got to my in-laws around 8:30. The blue van was there around 9:30 and we headed to National Airport to catch our flight to JFK. We didn’t have any problems at National other then my mother in law getting wanded and somehow even with them checking her bags them letting Desmond’s cup full of water through the security checkpoint. Here is a picture of Desmond enjoying his chocolate chip coffee cake at National.

We arrived at JFK and got our luggage fairly quickly, we then had to figure out where to go for the international flight. We figured it out and navigated JFK’s transit system. We arrived and checked in without too many problems, we then went to get something to eat thinking we had about an hour to 90 minutes till boarding, turns out we had 30 minutes, who knew they boarded super early. We got our food and then boarded. When boarding they checked our rolling luggage bag which wasn’t a big deal and the car seat. I let them take the car seat since they said they had car seats on board, and the info I had from the FAA said this was possible and we might not be able to use ours if they had them.

Turns out what they call car seat on an Air India flight are really bassinets, Eek! So we get aboard and ask the flight attendant about the car seat and learn that no they don’t have them. Which leads to Dan and his Dad having a long discussion that eventually involved getting the pilots approval to use our car seat for Desmond since we had paid for his full seat. It all got worked out, but Dan and I were not looking forward to having to deal with it on the flight home (turned out to be a non-issue, no problems at all with the car seat on the flight home, would have thought the flight out of India would be tougher then the flight out of the US on the issue).

Once it was settled Dan was upset, having to have dealt with the whole mess, but Desmond was happy since he was in his seat and we were happy since he was secure in his seat. We did try the seat forward facing for a few minutes since there was a TV screen in the back of every head rest, but Desmond wasn’t really interested in it, so we quickly turned him back rear-facing like he is use to.

Here are a couple of pictures of how Desmond spent some of the flight.

Unfortunately he did not spend most of the flight asleep, he got maybe 4 hours in 2 2 hour chunks. He did a lot of running down the aisles and iPod watching, we were so glad we decided to bring them, both on the flight and later in the trip as well, they were wonderful for keeping the boy entertained at odd times in the night.

Eventually we arrived in India and changed some money, got our luggage and headed out to meet everyone. They were all waiting outside the airport, since there are some strange regulations on who is allowed on the inside of the airport in India these days. Desmond and Dan were both wasted and I wasn’t doing much better.

We were there in India and we got all our bags on top of the Taxi and headed to Dan’s Aunt and Uncle’s house for the evening/night, it was our home base for the trip.

Okay I just uploaded a couple of pictures, I have a lot to go through and I’m going to start on the trip report to India in a few. Overall, the trip was decent. I am never doing it again with an 18 month old, either an 8 month old or younger or a 3 year old or older is fine, but an 18 month old was just a little too mobile, but not quite old enough to listen to why he shouldn’t be doing things. I’ll start off with the airport and work on from there!

So Desmond went to bed early last night, not as early as me, I erm fell asleep at his nap time and stayed asleep, but early none the less. So he was up around 3/3:30am. Between Dan and I we were able to keep him pretty happy till about 6am, when he decided it was time to go downstairs again. I took him downstairs and he led me to the fridge. Not a big deal, normally I open the fridge he gets what he wants and I close the fridge.

Not this morning though, this morning he points to the cheese drawer so I get him a thing of cheese, nope not what he wants. I take out the strawberries, he puts them back in, I offer an apple, he says “No, no, no!” He is reaching for something on the top shelf so I offer him some water, he shakes his head. I give up and close the fridge door after taking out and apple in case he decides to change his mind. He has a temper tantrum. After about 10 minutes I offer him stuff again, he keeps screaming, so I bring him back upstairs. It is around 6:45 by now. He doesn’t settle down upstairs but Dan gets up and we take him back downstairs, where Dan opens the fridge and Desmond takes out the Spinach Ravioli from Costco. He stops screaming and starts smiling. So we make the boy Ravioli for breakfast, and apparently that is just what he wanted, now why he won’t pull it out for me, I have no idea.