I'm happy

Yes, I did get to pet a kangaroo. This is a gray kangaroo, which is actually brown. The red kangaroos look mostly gray, so don't try to figure that one out either. Kangaroo fur is much softer than you'd think. It reminds me of petting a horse with its thick winter coat.

We saw the kangaroos at this place, the Healesville Animal Sanctuary. We also saw parrots, echidnas, wallabies, baby Tasmanian devils, koalas, platypus and wombats. Then we went wine tasting. And yes, we saw all of those animals BEFORE drinking wine, and no, we are not making any of them up.

The land down under

This is my nephew, Zach. He lives in Melbourne, Australia. He hangs out with wallabies. We think Zach is very cool, and he knows where the wallabies live, and will introduce us, so we are going to visit Zach in Australia. We are leaving tomorrow and will be there for a month. What? It's a long way - we might as well stay for awhile. I'm on maternity leave - this seems like a good use of my time.


Are we insane for traveling with a 4 1/2 month old baby to Australia? Probably. There has been a lot of hassle about car seats, and bassinets in the bulkhead seats and pre-approval of car seats, and what have you, but we think we have it all sorted. Seth's parents are meeting us in Los Angeles for the super-long part of the trip to Melbourne. I think it's 16-ish hours or something. I try not to think about it. I do think about the favorable 4:1 adult to baby ratio for the flight. Seth had it worked out as 4 hours per adult.

I've made packing lists, hauled out the suitcases, done most of the laundry, and thought extensively about what to pack. Actual packing has not yet occurred. But I did get a pedicure.

We will be petting wallabies and kangaroos, and seeing koalas, emus, duckbilled platypuses, fairy penguins, beaches, and vineyards. We will not be eating Vegemite. I've tasted it and its English cousin Marmite, and that was quite enough of that culinary adventure.

We think Zach is excited to see Helene, though he may be a bit disappointed that she does not do too much stuff yet, by his 3-year old standards. You know, like say words or play trains with him. When he first met her in December, he definitely expected that his baby cousin would be a little more exciting, and not just a tiny sleeping lump that everyone was inexplicably entranced by. I'm sure she will happily hold and gum a Thomas The Tank Engine, but that might not fit in with Zach's plans.

So, there might not be a whole lot of posts on here for the next month. I'll try to stick up some random photos of us with kangaroos and on the beautiful Melbourne beaches just to make you jealous, but I'll probably be too busy petting wallabies and tasting wine and enjoying grandparent babysitting services to exert myself too much. (Could I be traveling to AU just to get free babysitting? It's possible.)

I wonder what Helene will learn or do over the next month. She does something new every day, it seems. She's almost rolling over. She talks expressively to the ceiling fan. She is discovering her feet, and on a recent warm day, she rubbed her little feet and toes together to test out the feeling of barefootness. She is a little sponge, gazing with wide-open blue-grey eyes at everything in sight, drinking it in, as I carry her down our street. It's my favorite thing about her right now - watching her see and be amazed by the world for the first time.

Her look clearly says "Holy cow! I can hold my head up!" She's Australia-ready.


Gratuitous baby toes picture. No pedicure needed - cuteness is more than enough.

Updatery

(1) Feeling MUCH better since the day of this post. Immediately after that, I signed up for a baby yoga class, made plans with some other moms to take our babies out to a movie, bought a jogging stroller, and vowed to go to my neighborhood "Eaters and Sleepers" playgroup/coffee klatsch every week. Yes, I realize this is a long list of things. Overcompensate? Me?

(2) And since this post, the baby and I quite successfully flew cross-country to visit Grandma. Helene was quite fabulous. She fell asleep about 30 minutes before we boarded our first flight, from Newark to Salt Lake City, slept for a couple of hours, was awake for maybe an hour, and slept for the rest of that flight. She also slept for most of the second flight from Salt Lake to Boise. We had kind fellow travelers, who got bins for us at security, held things for us, and generally admired the baby (it does help when your baby gives a wide, gummy smile to pretty much anyone who makes eye contact). We had a kind flight attendant on our first flight who was happy to hold Helene, and who knew which airplane bathroom had a changing table in it. The pressure changes on takeoff and landing didn't faze the baby at all. I plopped her in our sling to carry her through the airports and to sleep. I tried to travel light, taking only a (crammed full) diaper bag on the plane. But I still had a change of clothes for both me and the baby in case of Diaper Blowout Emergencies. Which didn't happen, thankfully.

Now we just have to get back home today. I'm trying not to be superstitious about ye olde Friday the 13th and all, and am keeping crossed fingers that our previous good travel karma holds out. Because, wow, is four and a half hours a looooong time when you are on a full plane holding a completely cooperative/happy/sleeping baby. I don't even want to let thought enter my head about what it would be like if the baby was NOT cooperative/sleeping/happy. It's hard for you to sleep, hard for you to read. I tried to doze and watched the in-flight movie with no sound because I was too cheap to buy the $2 headphones on the plane. I might buy them this time. One of my friends won't travel with her young daughters because she had such a horrific experience with her oldest at five months (screaming baby, complete diaper explosion all over baby, stripping down, cleaning & changing baby in aisle of plane)- she says the memories still make her twitch. Yikes. So, fingers crossed, folks! Keep watching CNN to make sure you don't see us.

Flying the fearful skies

Some god of some kind help me, but I'm getting on two planes tomorrow with a 3-month old to go visit Grandma Wanda in Idaho. Alone. With the infant. And the fucking airlines. And fucking TSA. And all the other fucking people. Who all might be mean to us. I am utterly terrified. I've been having anxiety dreams and even anxiety daydreams about this for a week. So, should you be flying from Newark to Salt Lake City tomorrow, you might want to (a) reconsider your plans; or (b) just be sure you really do like babies before you get on that plane. I am simply hoping for dry pants and no newsworthy incidents. So keep scanning CNN. You'll know if something happened.

Camp Johanna

We visited Seth's Aunt Johanna at her charming beach house in Amagansett, Long Island. She calls it going to camp for the summer, and it was like camp. We tasted local wine, hiked, went to a craft fair, kayaked, walked on the beach, picked vegetables at an organic farm, and cooked fresh Atlantic seafood. Thank you, Aunt Johanna!

How the heck do you get to North Platte?

I know I've been slacking lately, and haven't posted too much. That's because I was on a week-long work trip to one of the centers of the railroading universe, North Platte, Nebraska. "Where?!!" you might very well ask. For when I was told that I would be going to North Platte, I had to do a little Google-mapping and Travelocity-ing myself to figure out how the heck you get to North Platte. The answer is that you fly to Denver, then you rent a car and drive 4 hours to southwestern Nebraska. You could opt to try the once-a-day 8-passenger puddle jumper from Denver to the bustling North Platte Regional Airport, but my colleagues do not recommend that, as inclement weather can turn the once-a-day into the once-a-week flight. So you drive. And on the way there, you amuse yourself by identifying breeds of cattle that you haven't seen much of since your years in New Mexico and Vermont. Or at least that's what I did. I saw lots of Black Angus (them's beef cattle), some Herefords (beef), some Angus-Hereford crosses (beefier beef??), the classic Woody Jackson black-and-white Holstein on a couple of dairy farms (you can smell those well before you get there, if you've been attuned to the aroma by living in Vermont), a few Texas Longhorns (beef again - I wouldn't want to be the one having to milk one of those), and one sort of brindled buckskin colored breed that I've never seen before (gotta look that one up- perhaps a Brown Swiss?).

What is in North Platte, you might ask, that would bring people there? The answer is Union Pacific Railroad's Bailey Yard, which is listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest railyard in the world. If you're a railfan or a "foamer," as they're less flatteringly known (due to tendency to foam at the mouth at the sight of a train), North Platte is Mecca. 120 trains a day; 10,000 railcars every 24 hours.

When I realized those little colored streaks across the photo were all trains and not Impressionist art, I was impressed. The yard is somewhat less impressive when you are driving the eight miles from end to end - the aerial view is definitely the best for the scale.

The other main attraction in the North Platte area is Ole's Big Game Steakhouse. The story is that old Ole made a ton of money with some wise stock market investments, and his wealth freed him to do whatever he wanted, which was apparently to travel the world and shoot everything that moves. Like Noah's Ark, but different. The food is tasty, and the game is plentiful. Definitely worth the trip if you just happen to be in the area.

Napa Valley

We were here a couple of weeks ago on vacation. Here's a sampling of some of the scenery.


Wine cave at Del Dotto - one of the oldest in Napa, hand-dug by Chinese immigrants. It has also survived earthquakes.














Above, vineyards near Artesa and Keenan Wineries