Juergensen Family Blog

Or as Deb puts it, she’s now been out of the womb as long as she was in it! I don’t know why, but this concept really tickles me. So we got a little cake and a little candle to celebrate what I’m calling her “equilateral birthday”.

This is such a cute time for her. She finally has really mastered the whole crawling thing. Which, on the one hand, is a whole lot of fun. One of her favorite new games is “chase”. One of us gets down to crawl on all fours and then chases her. She runs squealing and giggling away, until she hits a wall and then turns around and chases us, giggling like crazy. She’ll keep this up until her little muscles can’t keep her up and she collapses on her tummy. And even then she’ll try to keep it up squirming like the cutest little snake ever. Of course, the downside to crawling so well is that she gets to places in a hurry, and we’re suddenly realizing how many things are not quite as safe as we’d thought.

She’s also learned how to stand pretty well. She’ll pull herself upright on anything handy, from a table to a pant leg to a kittie. (the kittie of course had the good sense to run away before this endeavor progressed too far.) Naturally, though, she has no judgement about what’s a sensible thing to use to pull herself up – everything’s fair game. While this makes for great comedic material, it occassionally makes for a little scare when she first gets hold of something we hadn’t realized was so easily “tippable”. We keep a pretty close on eye on her these days, as she teaches us what additional things we need to childproof.

Some recent pictures are here.

Saturday (July 22) was Zoe’s first flight ever, a relatively modest trip from Newark to Chicago. We were somewhat anxious about this, and had bought her a seat due to the relatively low cost of the ticket. Fifty cents a minute seemed like a bargain to reduce the chances of a screaming baby – we were sure the other passengers would agree.

To our relief, the travel turned out to be fun for little Z. The crankiest part of the day was actually the drive to the airport rather than the airport itself, the flight, the rental car line, or the 240 mile drive to Wisconsin that followed.

The take-off went smoothly, and soon after Zoe polished off an 8-oz bottle and nodded off to sleep in Daddy’s arms. When he started to get uncomfortable after about 30 minutes, he attempted a transfer her to the car seat. This decision is one we face countless time – preserve the nap at all costs (Mommy’s usual course of action) or try to achieve a nap combined with parental comfort (Daddy’s choice). She woke up.

Next came the self-entertaining part of the trip. Unlike the rest of us, Zoe seemed to be entertained by simply sitting in the window seat and playing with the cushion and interior. When that lost its entertainment value, we gradually pulled out the toys we’d brought and gave her a styrofoam cup. Near the end of the flight that too had lost its entertainment value so I stood her up so she could look at other passengers who were happy to make faces at her. (Somewhat like church, there is always someone nearby who is unengaged and ready to participate in this game.)

We feared the landing, since this was when the ear pressure was likely to be worst. Thankfully our pilot was not the dramatic-landing type, and we flew into Chicago O’Hare without any ear pressure.

The car rental line was also entertaining and Zoe seemed to love taking it all in. On the drive, we got an hour nap, but it took us 3 ½ hours to go the first 120 miles, due to the frequency of stops – so this is what traveling with kids is like. (Imagine when she doesn’t have a diaper and can actually initiate stops.) When we finally arrived at the hotel, she was ecstatic to sit on the floor, play with a spoon and crawl around. Mom and Dad were relieved to call the day a success!