Baby's travel experience so far amounts to afternoon pram promenades along the river and four car journeys. First car trip: short ride home from hospital - five day old baby sleeps all the way. Second excursion: return trip to the airport to pick up grandmère - 3 week old baby sleeps through puncture incident, all the way to the airport, and part of the way back. So far so good, babies always sleep in the car don't they?
Not this one.
Car trip number 3: short ride to the garden centre and back. La petite, aged almost 3 months, starts screaming inconsolably before we're two minutes down the road. Resorting to the dreaded dummy, which we'd rather stupidly left in the boot necessitating an emergency stop, finally calms her.
Travel tale number 4: a couple of days before celebrating 4 months in this world, we treat la petite coquinette to another car ride and another trip to the airport to pick up Mamy. She remains wide awake all the way out, and wide awake and screaming all the way back. Dummies, toys, singing, pulling faces, making funny noises, gagging, none of it works, and the non-functioning climatisation doesn't help either. And in five weeks we look forward to 12 hours in the car on a trip back to Blighty. That'll be fun…
Otherwise it's been a quiet week. La grandmère has got to know her newly alert and demanding grandchild, and her feeding quirks. La bienheureuse left her trois bien-aimés at home on Tuesday night to fly to Germany for a work meeting the next day. First night away from baby, first time papa has had to put la petite coquinette to bed since a not-so-successful attempt three weeks ago. He approached the task with some trepidation, but never fear. The two angels' bedtime routine works like a charm. She may not sleep in cars but she sleeps all night.
It wasn't so quiet earlier yesterday evening. The Punjabi princess was back in Lyon for a visit and graced us with her presence. Looking forward to her own happy event in a few months, she was eager to meet notre petite for the first time. And was treated to a big smile, swiftly followed by a loud wail of distress. And for the next ninety minutes, our visitor was treated to baby behaviour at its worst. Certainly our baby's behaviour at its worst. Not quite sure what brought that on - probably a mixture of over-excitement and over-tiredness. Fortunately, once la petite was put to bed silence and normality returned - silence in a manner of speaking: dinner with three women is never a particularly quiet affair, not these particular women anyway.
