Half Moon Bay
Sunday, June 28th, 2009I don’t know why it should have come as a shock to discover that Hobbes is a morning person, but somehow it did. I was rather hoping that this was one of those baby things that he’d get over in time, like peeing on his parents while his diaper’s being changed, or trying to eat his fist, or going cross-eyed when people approach him from behind. Unfortunately, while he’s gotten over at least one of the above (guess which!) I’m afraid that rising with the sun is not one of them. I don’t know why I should be surprised; his father is just as bad, a fact which I have told him repeatedly would have been a dealbreaker if I’d known that about him when he proposed.
In his own defense, the Guy is prone to remind me that he didn’t become a morning person until after we got married. I’m not entirely sure how to take this, to be frank.
“So now that you’ve got me, you don’t want to stay in bed with me?”
He usually changes the subject.
At any rate, Hobbes’s preference for mornings is why we were on the road at an exhaustingly early hour of the morning in order to go to Half Moon Bay this morning.
Of all the changes that having a child has inflicted on us, going out is one of the most unexpected. I hadn’t realized (though of course I should have) how much immobility had contributed to Hobbes’s mellow personality; if one doesn’t have the ability to run around, much less roll over, of course one is perfectly content to simply lie around and try to suck on one’s fingers. As it happens, over the past few weeks, a peculiar but nonetheless speedy three-point crawl has entered Hobbes’s repertoire. Lately, he has taken to following us around the house — including those areas that are not actually childproofed yet — with the end result that he manages to run us ragged long before we manage to exhaust him.
Thus, our latest life adjustment: take him out and introduce him to new experiences. Today, we took him to the coast for the first time.
It was a one-hour car ride, and all things considered, he took it quite well. He woke at 6, and the Guy entertained him while I caught a nap after a restless night. We’re experiencing a heat wave in California, with the result that it was already 76 degrees when Hobbes woke up. Given that it’s always about 5 – 10 degrees cooler inside the house than it is outside, that means it was already well into the 80s at 6 AM. We dressed and packed accordingly.
It may have ended up in the 90s down where we live, but at the coast, the wind chill was -30.
Ocean, Hobbes. Hobbes, meet the Pacific.
As it turned out, he loved the wind. And the wind chill.
Sand, not so much.
Insofar as major road trips go, it was fairly successful. True, we forgot the diaper bag. On the other hand, we remembered the baby, so we ended up net positive.
Right?
