Taranaki Trip

I spent last week in Taranaki visiting the family while Brad was on his market tour. I was really looking forward to getting out of Auckland for a bit and showing Sophie off to everyone. We left on a beautiful sunny Monday morning and arrived in Stratford late afternoon to a bitterly cold day – I guess that is to be expected when my mum lives under the mountain! However she had the house all nice and cozy and toasty warm for her girls. It was a bit of a loooooong trip and I don’t think Sophie was overly happy to be stuck in the car for so long, but she handled it like a trooper (the trip back was a different story, read about that further on).

It was fantastic to see everyone, and we were very well looked after at mums. I got some much needed rest and a couple of really good nights sleep and of course Sophie just fitted in perfectly, in fact she was even better behaved at mums than she is at home! Every time I put her down to sleep at mums she would just go straight off to sleep without a murmur and wake with coos and smiles – at home, she has to make a big drama out her of bed time, just to keep us on our toes! The weather turned to custard on the second day, so we just stayed indoors for the next day and then went into New Plymouth town to visit friends and family (and of course I left the camera behind again). But Brad’s sister Rochelle took some great photos while visiting us out in Stratford and I will put them up on the blog soon.

As mentioned above the trip back to Auckland was just horrid. The weather was dreadful so of course I had to drive slowly with my precious cargo and came back via Hamilton (which adds about half and hour to the journey), so I could stop and feed Sophie in the parents room of the mall where we would be nice and dry. Typically the weather turned worse and I hit a thunderstorm 20 minutes outside Hamilton and could hardly see the road in front of me, so that slowed us down even more. By the time we hit Hamilton Sophie was stirring and making it known that she was hungry, luckily we got to the mall pretty quickly and before she knew it she was changed and fed and having a bit of play time before being bundled back into the car. Due to the weather conditions and the slow trip we hit the Auckland motorway at dead on 5pm and hit the traffic not long after. By this stage Sophie had had enough and just started screaming – not nice little cry’s, but full on heart breaking screams, and of course I was in the fast lane of the motorway with bumper to bumper traffic…I managed to get off at Greenlane and stop at the Foodtown where I got Sophie out of her car seat and gave her a big hug and managed to calm her down. But of course we couldn’t stay there forever, so back onto the motorway we went and Sophie went back to screaming. By the time we got home, Sophie hated me and I couldn’t wait to get out of the car and hug her. She managed to calm down when she saw Brad and then had a big feed, play and then sleep. Whew, I don’t think I will be doing that again in a hurry – six hours cooped up in the car is far too long.

To top it all off, she used to love her car seat and go to sleep easily every time we went out in it but today we decided to go out for a coffee and to do the grocery shopping as a family for the first time and it turned into a disaster – I ended up having to take her out of the car seat and carry her around the supermarket, every time I put her back in it she would cry – sigh, I hope this isn’t a sign of what’s to come as I am going to need to go out in the future and if she’s now got a phobia about it then outings by myself are going to become impossible! Will try again tomorrow and see what happen, hopefully she was just hungry…

Ingrid