First, the update on Maija's first day with a bottle exclusively: Jay was able to get Maija to drink a little from a bottle before I got home on my first day back at work. She still isn't thrilled about it, but she will eventually drink a little very slowly if you work with her for a while. We also discovered that my breast milk has an abundance of an enzyme called lipase, which breaks down milk fat and makes it smell and taste sour, although it is still safe to drink. Usually it takes a while for this to happen, but it happens really quickly if you have too much of the enzyme. This enzyme works even when the milk is frozen, so the milk we were thawing and trying to feed to Maija for the past month tasted really bad to her. No wonder she hated the bottle. The enzyme is neutralized by scalding the milk before freezing, so now we do that and the milk is fine. Hopefully this means more bottle success in the future.
In much more interesting news, we went for a short camping trip this past weekend when Jay had to go to a meeting near Yosemite. The picture above is taken from right near our campsite, which was in a valley surrounded by mountains . It's about a 5.5hr drive from Petaluma. We drove a few hours the first night and stayed in Tahoe, then continued on to the eastern side of the Sierras in the morning. We found traveling with Anja generally pretty easy before Maija was around, but the level of complexity of travel now is definitely much higher.
I was skeptical when Jay said we could/should bring her, but when we were unable to find a dogsitter for our camping weekend we brought the dog along too with the two kids in our small hatchback. And we still brought camping gear, kid gear, and two tents.
We realized as we were driving out of Petaluma that were on our first trip in which were outnumbered by our dependents.
The area was absolutely beautiful. The campground was rustic, with about half the sites right on this cold river. People were pulling trout of it all day and we regretted leaving our fishing poles at home. It was at about 5000' elevation I think.
Both kids took naps in their tents right away, which was unfortunately not an indication of how well they would sleep at night. Anja tossed and turned most of the night, both nights, and Maija wanted to nurse all night. The first night I had to change four poopy diapers before morning and the second night Maija nursed every single hour until sunrise.
Otherwise, Maija was pretty easygoing about the trip, as expected, and Anja's experience was dependent mainly on how well we worked around her sleep schedule each day. She was not a fan of any of the extended trips in the car.
But Anja really had a great time. She liked eating snacks at the picnic table, and running around with one of her many magic wands she found.
Maija is just happy if you're carrying her.
Magic wand!
Here's a little spot at the campground at the river. Anja didn't want to walk very far, but she liked exploring around the river and the bushes nearby.
S'mores were definitely her favorite part of the trip.
I'm cute.
On our way back, we spent the whole day driving through the northern part of Yosemite. For almost every minute of the drive there was at least one baby or dog whining or crying and needing a diaper change, bathroom break, snack or attention. And if two of them were quiet, the third would whine or cry and get the others worked up again. We had to stop a lot, and I spent quite a lot of time feeding Maija.
A popular place for rock climbers, you can see the tiny dots of the climbers on the rock face here. We stopped and watched for a little bit, and had a conversation with Anja about how she can do that if she wants to when she's older. She was really upset that she couldn't do it right now.
Most of the drive looked like this, although it was tough to enjoy it fully with various whining and crying noises much of the time.
It was a great trip, but we did forget one thing on the list.
