To NS and back

Not quite "to infinity and beyond" but Buzz Lightyear has a better marketing department.

We just got back last night from two glorious weeks in Nova Scotia. It was Quinn's first major road trip and he did pretty well with the car travel part. He had minor meltdowns through Montreal in both directions, but then again so do I so you can't really blame him. Maybe he picks up on the tenseness in the car. We did the trip in two days in both directions and stopped a lot, sometimes for an hour or more. It all made it very manageable. We tried to time it so that we were in motion whenever he was about to go to sleep. Then when he awoke we would usually have about 15 minutes before he needed to stop, which Bec could manage to extend to half an hour with a full-time distraction effort. By the end of the trip back he was having some quiet happy time on his own in the car seat which gained us some more miles, but he was also sleeping less which offset that advantage. Day1 of the trip back he slept in some large chunks - likely due to the full-court-press of family stimulation of the preceding two days - and before we knew it we had achieved two thirds of our distance objective with one minor stop. It took a couple of major stops to get the rest of the way, but the time pressure was off by that point.

Traveling with a 4-month old really changed my outlook on travel. Instead of being focused on the destination and going like mad, I was focused on Quinn and the needs of our family. It made the trip a lot more pleasant instead of the grueling haul I used to make it. We were open to making it three days of travel in both directions this time if it needed to be, which further took pressure off each day. Of course this particular time we have the luxury of time since I don't need to be back to work until July.

I'll write more about our time in NS as I have time. For now it's time to take our little Buzz Lightyear off to the doctor for a routine checkup.