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"You won't be able to take the baby on those trips of yours around Australia..."
A brief post for the many, many people who said we couldn't travel to remote places with Lex.
Post-Melbourne trip, my son, at 8 weeks, has seen more of the country than most of the people who offered me this advice, and we aren't home yet. Interestingly we have discovered travelling with him so far inland is no different than travelling with him from Canberra to Melbourne was.
10,000 years ago we all used to be nomads, yet somehow we managed.
And I have the Belwood!
A quick selection of pictures of places he's been, below the cut.
Post-Melbourne trip, my son, at 8 weeks, has seen more of the country than most of the people who offered me this advice, and we aren't home yet. Interestingly we have discovered travelling with him so far inland is no different than travelling with him from Canberra to Melbourne was.
10,000 years ago we all used to be nomads, yet somehow we managed.
And I have the Belwood!
A quick selection of pictures of places he's been, below the cut.
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those people should be less boring.
Love the picture of you and Lex on the sand.
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Didn't actually expect to be travelling this far with him so early on, though. But after the massive learning experience that was the drive to Melbourne, we figured we may as well test what we'd learned.
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By the time Blake was 9 days old he'd travelled from Perth to Kununurra. I don't see the problem. Of course, we were in a plane, but that's only semantics. Travel is travel and children go where their parents go. Full stop.
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My parents when we were small took us around W.A and from what they told me they seem to manage ok mainly cos they were organised and I just wish they had of taken photos .
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I miss you all so much.
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Maybe one day I'll get to see a bit more of the country than capital cities & airports.
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So how do you deal with the heat and sun? I'm getting a bit paranoid about that, with summer approaching and all the warnings we get about keeping the sun off young babies!
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Lex already has a hat that covers his head and neck, and we have the baby wrap. So if we suspect we're going to be in the full sun for more than a minute, we make sure to pull the wrap around so it covers Lex's arms and legs.
Long trips in the car seat, and while in the hotel room, we're tending towards having him in one thin layer or just the nappy. We'd give him nappy-free time, but don't want to risk a poo escape onto carpets, bedding, etc. that isn't ours. Outside he's in clothing, even though it will make him warmer, because it also protects his skin.
Also, while driving we keep an eye on where the sunlight is hitting in relation to the baby seat. Early and later in the day we have a gauze cloth to cover it and protect him from direct sunlight.
At night it's still warm (we're currently in a hotel in Broken Hill, hence the wireless net connection) so he sleeps in just a nappy with a gauze swaddle cloth to prevent the chance of him getting chilled. We're not using the air-con in the room at night in case he gets chilled, and only using it in short bursts during the day to help drop the temp a little. Not trying to get the room really cool, because then his system will be having to deal with regular radically see-sawing temperatures.
And we're making sure to feed him a lot. He may not be hungry, but he does get thirsty. We can be sure he's getting enough by the sheer quantity and weight of wet nappies we're dealing with. We're also using plenty of nappy rash cream to prevent the effects of being in a warm, wet nappy.
My only paranoia is that babies being too warm is one of the things they think is a SIDS risk, but that's hard to avoid during an Aussie summer. And SIDS is something I'm paranoid about anyway. Rarely a week goes by that I don't check that he's still breathing at some point. And during one exceptionally long sleep he had while I was driving, I started to worry that maybe he'd died quietly in the back.
At this point if any such thing were to happen, or he just got overheated or a bit burned, we'd at least know that it wasn't as if we hadn't been very careful.
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If not, there's yet another use for cloth nappies:-)
Dad strung a line across the top of the car windows, we had a pile of nappies, and mum had a bucket of water. Get a nappy wet, wring it out and hang it over the 'string' (it was a little stronger that that:-) ) and have the window open a bit.
That's what we used going around Australia, and on our Nullabor trips...
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I'm paranoid about SIDS too, although there's probably a higher risk just driving around the suburbs with a baby!
I think every parent checks for breathing. For the first few weeks I could barely breath myself, the urge to watch Clara's every breath was so strong.
Travelling with babies is easy ..
Either way, you just need to plan more carefully than you would for yourselves alone.
Re: Travelling with babies is easy ..
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Who the hell told you that?
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And that last picture is GORGEOUS.
Sorry I missed you last weekend - I ended up falling asleep at about the time I was planning to set out. It's been a bastard of a couple of weeks at work, with 14 hour days and other things that wreck weekend.
Otoh, I may be up in Canberra in a month or so...
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Also, you'll have to be sure to give me plenty of tips for the travelling thing for when I'm ready to set out again.
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I wish I could have been such a well-travelled baby at that.
...oh, wait. I was (Canada - England - Canada - Australia). Hrrm. Not sure what to make of that, except that maybe a well-travelled baby won't necessarily grow into a wanderlusting adult? Sigh.
I do think I was pretty good as a travelling pre-teen/teenager though (no "are we there yet?", I just learned to sit in the back and tell myself stories until we got somewhere).
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I don't get the "you can't travel with a baby comments", my parents travelled through Australia loads when my brothers and I were little. There are some great pictures of my brother aged 9 months being bathed in a bucket by a campfire somewhere in outback NT/WA and some of my earliest memories are making damper in the middle of nowhere.
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Silly people who think you can't travel with a baby! I had been to three different continents by age 5. :)