David's First Vacation.

About 9 months ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to one of these daily deal sites that was offering 3 nights at the beach in Pensacola for like $150.  I’m not a big beach guy (I don’t like the ubiquitous sand and salt, plus I tend to spontaneously combust if I’m left out in the sun too long), but I figured David and Christy would enjoy it, and more importantly, it would be a good dry run vacation for future Disney trips.  Christy and I have become big fans of vacationing in the off-season, and work has been slow-ish, so on Thursday of the week before last, we decided to leave for Pensacola on the following Monday.
So on Monday morning, we woke up, packed up the car and headed out.  The car ride was pretty uneventful.  We left right about the time that David was ready for his first nap of the day, so he slept through about the middle of Mississippi.  We stopped at the Alabama welcome center, had some lunch (Golden Potstickers FTW), then drove for another couple of hours and arrived in Pensacola around 3 in the afternoon.  

As one might expect, we immediately got beach-ready and headed to the ocean.  David has a sandbox at home that he loves, so he was pretty excited about all of the sand on the beach.  I think he’d have been happy to just sit there and dig for 4 days.  He wasn’t quite as certain about the ocean, but once we’d walked in the edge of the surf a little bit, he was ready to go out with mom.  Christy carried him out to 3 or 4 feet of depth, and he had a great time kicking his legs in the water until a wave inundated him, then he was ready to go play in the sand some more.  And that was basically how the whole trip went, with lunch and dinner mixed in.  We did have a small accident on the last evening we were there - Christy was playing chase with David on the boardwalk while we were waiting for dinner, and he tripped and did a face-plant on the concrete.  He got a little bit of a bloody nose, but all in all, not that bad.  He didn’t like it very much, though.  

Obviously this wasn’t our first short road trip with David, but I’m happy to say that the travelling experience is getting better every time.  This one didn’t really have any fussing or crying until about 30 minutes outside of Pensacola.  So, basically 4 hours of happy toddler.  We turned his car seat around before we left, so he is now facing the windshield.  I think he likes it a lot better.  I certainly do - now when he whines or makes noise, I can see that nothing is wrong and just ignore him.  And the hotel-room-with-a-baby experience wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected either.  By the time we got settled and ready for bed at night, David was so tired that he probably would have slept on the floor, so my worries about him having issues with a foreign sleeping environment were unfounded.  Anyway, I have high hopes that another 12 months or so will find us with a 2 year old that is ready for 12 hours in the car to Orlando.

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15 month cardiology checkup

Well I’m a slacker.  I know that this is already widely known, but I figured I’d state it for the record.

David had his 15 month cardiology checkup on the 6th of October.  There was literally nothing to report, so I haven’t felt particularly compelled to write this.  But since the whole point of this blog is to help people keep up-to-date with David and how he’s doing, I figure I’d be a terrible person if I just never wrote a checkup post at all.

So here’s the update:  nothing.  In fact, our normal doctor was tending to an emergency at another hospital in town, so we saw the guy that I think they just hired as their 4th doctor.  He listened to david’s heart, looked at his blood pressure and oxygen saturation, and basically said, “yup, looks good to me!”  He increased David’s Enalapril dose a little bit in order to keep up with his growth (note to people with emergency info sheets - I will be sending you a new one), scheduled the 18 month checkup, and that was it.  The truth is, we really only get checked once every 6 months.  The ones in between that are just growth checks, just to let the doctor put his eyeballs on David and make sure he still looks fine.  And thus far, he still does.

In other news, David is now walking like he invented it.  The only time he crawls anymore is to traverse steps and to hide.  He has gained an affinity for being chased around the house, so we do a lot of that.  He still loves water, so he spends lots of time outside looking for puddles or other random collections of water in which he can splash.  And since the weather is getting cooler and nicer, mommy and daddy are okay with this.

Pirate Face