A family that travels together

Austen is four and a half months old now. He's over 26", 17.1lbs and comfortably sitting in the 90th percentile range for his age. I'm buying 9-12 month clothes for him! Ahhh, that tiny baby stage was really over in just a few weeks for us. I miss it already.

So a lot has happened since the last post. Joel flew back to Singapore to be a keynote speaker at a big UX conference. It went well and he was "Twitter famous" for a few hours. He caught up with our friends back there and flew back home after a whirlwind three days. He was there for the tail end of the awful haze that made international news and due to the hoarding and up-selling of masks going on in SG he brought with him a whole suitcase of N95 masks for our friends. We have even more appreciation now for our hill-top place here with the crisp clean ocean breeze blowing.

We did our first road trip with Austen and he was really quite cool about it considering how much he loathes the car. We just split our day up into two hour chunks of driving followed by stops for eating and stretching. Definitely a healthier way to travel for the adults in the car too.

A low point of the month was the disappearance of Kopi-o. Folks on Twitter and Facebook probably saw our posts about it. Really it was one of the worst days of my life. We made a huge effort in our search, leafleting and walking the nearby areas and calling him over and over. Joel was the hero in the end. He crawled under a rundown house and saved Kopi-o from a possum fight and ran home with him under his hoodie. Joel was badly scratched up but Kopi-o was thrilled to magically appear back in his safe home.

We're heading up to Canada for our first trip back there together in two years. This will be Austen's 5th plane trip and a first introduction to most of his extended family and a chance for some more concentrated grandparent time. Joel and I will be arriving already exhausted from this past week of me solo parenting and him at another conference. I'm hoping we can finally catch up on some sleep. Ha! Famous last words. Cheers everyone, we hope you're having a great Summer.