Wow, September came and went much faster than I anticipated, hence the cone of silence over the past six weeks.
Little Ethan is nearly five months old… which scares the crud out of me. I swear we were in the hospital for his birth like last week! It’s funny, I just had my 30th birthday a few weeks ago, and it felt like nothing. For most of my friends, it was a coming-of-age moment, a huge milestone. For me though, I feel like I already hit that with Ethan’s birth; after that, my age is simply a number. Plus I’ll still say I’m 29 for the next few years anyways.
We recently changed car seats from the infant to the older model, and thank goodness for that. Ethan absolutely HATED his old car seat. I can’t remember the make and model, because Mrs. Taylor did the buying for it, but I’ll bring it up for a future edit. Ethan was very atypical; he would scream for at least 2/3 of all car rides, and here’s where he gets a little quirky. If we were going fast enough, Ethan was quiet and peaceful; but slow down or stop, and he became a banshee. And the magical number was 80 km/hour (or 50 mph). I felt like I was in Back to the Future, with a screaming baby in the back instead of the flux capacitor, but the idea was the same; hit 80 as fast as possible to save the world (or in my case, my hearing and sanity).
If you hit a red light… you were done. He would slowly wind up with a low moan, becoming a mid-range warble, and then finally into a red-faced, tonsil-shaking, glass-shattering wail. I would grip the steering wheel like a Nascar driver, and then gun it out of the gate to get back to 80… at which point the crying would subside into complaining grunts and unhappy whimpers. We could never figure out why.
Thankfully, we no longer have to, as the new carseat is much more comfortable. He actually sits quietly, often SMILING, while we strap him into this one. And he hasn’t cried once in nearly a dozen car trips! It’s too bad babies won’t retain their early memories once they’re able to speak, I’d love to pick Ethan’s brain and figure out why Back to the Future became a metaphor for our travels together.
