What have we been upto? Its been a while since I wrote a post so its time for an update.
Last week we went to Broken Hill. That is a 10 hour drive from our place. Quite significant with an 18 month old. We split up the trip - 4 hrs to Nyngan - stayed the night - then another 6 hours to BH.
I am one of those parents who doesn't let their child watch TV and would NEVER let their child watch a dvd player whilst in the car....oh how that has changed! A dvd player is basically an essential for a 10 hour trip (well...for a 4 hr trip or a 6 hr trip). I dug through our dvd's - and found two child friendly ones (a blinky bill one that I won in some competition and a Colin Buchannan one that I got from playgroup last year). I put them both on the ipad and thought I wouldn't need them but had them just incase. I am SO glad that I had them!!!
They were fantastic for after about 3 hours when OB was sick of looking out the window, we had finished the snacks, thrown the drink bottle on the floor, thrown all the toys away, pulled his shoes and socks off and was just full on red faced screaming. I attached the ipad to the back of the seat, put on blinky and bam...silence! He just stared at that screen for about half an hour! WOW. What a difference it made! It was great. I only ended up putting one of the 4 episodes of blinky on (im technologically challenged) so it went for 30 mins but that was enough time to calm him down into a relaxed state and he seemed to be fine when it finished.
We stayed with Joshs uncle, which was fabulous. OB slept each night 7-6.30am. Usually he sleeps till 7am but I think it was a tad colder in his room...not that i'm complaining - its still a great sleep! He did get a bit out of routine being away and being spoilt rotten.
We have been home for 3 days now and he is SLOWLY getting back to normal. We have had a few tantrums since getting back - mainly due to food. Because we were on holidays we just couldn't be bothered to be good parents and just let him eat whatever (and by that I mean muslei bars, babycinos, muffins and a few biscuits). And I think the main downfall was letting him eat WHENEVER. Usually he only eats breakfast, lunch and dinner so having snacks and eating whenever made him quite demanding for food and not so keen to eat his main meals (because he was full from snacks). So we are getting back to normal. It was really hard to stretch him out today when he was pointing to his char (obviously hungry) at 5.30 and we dont have dinner till 6. Luckily hubby distracted him and we were able to drag it out and he ate all his dinner (lots of veggies yay).
Well thats where we are at the moment. OB gets his 18 month needles tomorrow. Hopefully they won't affect him (none of the others did).
All in all - holidays are great. Having OB sleep all night and behave in the car (there were about 2 outbursts over the 20hrs of driving) made a big difference, I can't imagine how exhausting it would be if that wasn't the case.
