My little sister Rachel had her first baby on April 16th, a healthy little girl named Lily. Naturally, we decided to go to Missouri shortly thereafter to see the new baby and introduce the rest of my family to Maya.
Maya and Lily
I won’t lie. We were a hair on the nervous side about taking a five month old on a flight. Maya is a really good-natured little girl, but trapping her in a pressurized metal tube several miles above the ground is a whole different deal.
Maya at the Austin airport
Generally she handled it all pretty well. We had two issues. The first was that airports are busy places full of all kinds of people and hubbub. Maya was way too excited about all the new things to see to bother with silly little (completely necessary) things like naps. This put a bit of an edge on her mood. And it didn’t get much better on the plane. She won’t take a pacifier, so we let her work on her bottle during takeoff and landing, so that really wasn’t an issue. However, every time she’d drift off to sleep, the intercom would blare and she’d be startled awake. She was nice about it and didn’t make much noise, but it was clear that the poor thing was exhausted.
The second issue caught me completely off guard. Apparently airport bathrooms are actually infant torture chambers, at least in Maya’s eyes. We had barely laid her down on the changing table before she turned beet red and screamed. She kept that up through an entire poop-laden diaper change.
On the way into Missouri, we had the good sense to duck into one of those family rest rooms so her screaming fit could be contained. On the way home from Missouri, because clearly there is no learning curve at all, I chose to use the changing table in the crowded women’s rest room instead. I walked in and laid Maya down on the first changing table I saw, which was right by the paper towels and trash can on the way out of the rest room. I barely had her (again shitty) diaper off before the screaming started. So there I was, trying to clean the crap off a squirmy angry baby under the watchful eye of a steady stream of disapproving foot traffic. We of course got through it, and once I was finished, I noticed that there was another changing table at the far end of the bathroom where we could have had our stinky crying jag in relative peace. Lesson learned.
Four generations of Schmidts
While illness and flood waters kept us from seeing everyone we’d have liked to see, we still had a really nice visit. We got to meet tiny little Lily. Maya got to see many of her great aunts and great uncles and of course she spent some time with her Great Grandma Schmidt. Even Rachel and Michael’s (and Lily’s!) dog Gus got in on the action. Maya seemed to really get a kick out of letting Gus nose around at her hand.
Maya and Gus
Maya is old enough that she was able to show off her personality and preferences a little bit. She doled out smiles and baby jabber liberally. She and Grandpa watched some TV together. She and Grammy did lots of talking. She showed off how much she likes to eat and how much she likes her bath. Unfortunately, she also demonstrated her complete dislike of anything that even hinted at her napping (I think she yelled at Grandpa every time he rocked the recliner while holding her). We’re still kind of new at this parenting thing, so we didn’t have our crap together enough to actually take all the pictures we should have taken. We’re missing any of Maya with either her Grammy or her Aunt Rachel and Uncle Michael. We’ll do better next time.
Maya and Cushman
We even managed to sneak in a quick lunch with our friend Cushman (who has an actual first name – Matt – but I can’t seem to stop calling him Cushman). On our way out of town on Monday, we met for lunch at Chris’s Pancake and Dining (which I definitely recommend) and caught up a bit. Maya and Cushman got along well. More and more I’m discovering that it’s lots of fun to introduce her to people. We’re really proud of our cute, good-natured girl!
On the flight home, Maya again was completely worn out. This time though, it was like she was on a mission to sleep. She fell asleep shortly after our flight took off from St Louis, slept through landing and takeoff at Dallas (we had a stopover, no plane change), and didn’t wake up to around the time we were landing in Austin.
