Personal: First “Vacation” as a Family

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

This past weekend was a huge milestone for us as a family. We went on a “road trip” for a “vacation”! Alright, I know it sounds wonderful but there is a reason I put road trip and vacation in quotes 🙂 . It was less of a vacation and more of a test of how our son would react to a new environment. We chose a destination that was about an hour and half from our home – a small Island in the Puget sound called Camano Island. Having said that, it was still a great break to get away from the daily rut. Our son was largely okay during the drive. Although, my wife had to sit with him in the back seat. He usually tends to get bored after some time and then gets cranky. If my wife keeps shuffling through the toys, he is fine. The airbnb we booked had really nice views of Puget Sound making it easy to get the island vacation feel 🙂 . On the first night, we had issues with the heat. I followed the instructions laid down by the host but the fireplae did not turn on. It seemed like the pilot light was out and I wasn’t able to get it to work. There was another heater (radiator type) that made some crackling sounds when I turned it on. Not liking that, I turned it off. We had plans of having our son sleep with us in the same room given the new place and all but given the issues with the heater, we decided he would sleep in a different room where there was an electrical heater. We tried to keep the room settings as close to home as we could (we even took the white noise machine from home). However, the room wasn’t dark enough and our son woke up at 4:15 the first morning so we had to tend to him then.

On saturday, we decdied to explore the place a bit and went to the beach close to our airbnb followed by the Cama beach state park. With the nice warm weather, stunning viewes all around, the place is awesome. Pictures don’t do the place justice but here are a couple of shots from our day out:

My son and I enjoying the beautiful views and conteplating about life! 😛
A nice click by my wife. I think her photograph turned out much better than whatever I was photographing there 🙂

It wasn’t really a “day” out because we headed out of the airbnb after our son’s first nap so around 3pm and came back home at around 7pm. But as they say, its not the amount of time you spend enjoying but the quality of time that matters. So it was a throroughly enjoyable day with the family and nice to get away from the daily rut. The next day, we decided to head back early so left the place around 11:15 and were back home by 1:00 to get ready for the grind. The trip was a good test and now we know what all we should have packed and what all we packed that was unnecessary. A learning for the next trip!

Btw, another bonus activity I was able to do, was get a nice picture of the night sky. Friday night was forecasted to be clear (although it got cloudy after 1:30 am) so I decided to take some star trail pictures with the puget sound as the foreground. I did not carry my telescope or the star tracker and it was too bright (with the moon and city lights) for milky way shots so the choice was simple. Here is a processed image of the night sky I captured. The orange/yellow glow on the left is the cloud cover that was approaching and the bluish purple tint, I am assuming, is auroral activity?

All in all, it was a nice family “road trip” and a “vacation”. Looking forward to a real vacation sometime soon!

Personal: Out of the burrow!

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While technically the zoo visit a few weeks ago was what we should call coming out of our burrow from hibernation, this past weekend we took advantage of the amazing Pacific North West spring weather and finally ventured out for some physical activity. I’m voting to call that as the official out of the burrow activity 🙂 . What better way to enjoy spring weather than going for a hike on one of the several thousand beautiful trails offered by PNW.

It was the first time that we were outdoors with our son for such a long period of time, burning some calories and enjoying the sunny skies and clear air. It felt real good, even though we were/are grossly out of shape. We ended up doing a 3.4 mile hike partly through forests and partly through the cityscape. It’s amazing how in PNW it is very easy to go from the concrete jungles to the natural forests with a couple mile drive!

This particular hike had a gradient and is usually done from elevation down but we did it the other way round to burn some more calories 🙂 .While we did not end up burning as many calories as I’d initally thought, I’m sure the added weight of carrying my son is not reflected in the stats so the numbers should be slightly better than below. Here is a snapshot of our hike:

Did you look at the temperature? It was hottt!!! Luckily though the trail was mostly through shaded forests so we did not feel the heat as much. The trip back through the neighborhoods adjacent to the hike was through the sun but it wasn’t bad as the trip back was quite quick given the descending gradient and paved roads.

Like I mentioned before, it felt really nice to get out there. It sure brought in some sense of normalcy. We plan to keep this trend (n=1 is definitely not a trend but I am choosing to call it that 🙂 ) and hope to get out more often during spring and summer. With me fully vaccinated and my wife about to get her first shot soon, we feel a bit more comfortable hanging out with friends outside. Hopefully indoors (with other vaccinated familes) once we are fully vaccinated.

Looking forward to a normal and fun filled summer! For now, time to close out this blog. I will leave you with a picture from our hike:

Our first hike as a family!

Personal: One trip round the sun!

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This past week was my son’s first birthday! All that means is that the planet earth made a trip around the sun and is back at more or less the same place relative to the sun. In terms of space-time, we are never back at the same place. The sun is revolving around the galactic core and the milky way itself is moving relative to the local cluster and space itself is expanding. Check this video out if you aren’t familiar with how everything in the universe moves and how the current calendar came into being:

My point is, the yearly celebration is quite arbitrary. If the earth took a couple of months longer to revolve, our birthdays would have been every 15 calendar months. I think what is important is to celebrate developmental milestones, but may be our developmental milestones also align with the revolution of the earth because of millions of years of evolution 🙂 ? Anyhow, given our lives revolve around the revolutions the earth makes 🙂 , it is important to celebrate milestones based on this construct. So we planned to do exactly that for our son’s birthday. Except, you know, COVID!

We still decided that such an important milestone be memorable. While we could not invite friends and family to a party, we neverthless did a small celebration where we decorated the house and my wife made a cake and we did a video call with out close family on his birthday. Our son seems to like the llama llama books so we made that as the theme for his birthday. Here is what the setup looked like:

Setup for the birthday boy

The following day, my wife had planned for professional photoshoot. We were hesitant to do it because of COVID but the photographer had been quarantining between shoots and planned to wear a mask for the duration. So we thought that it was a tolerable risk. My wife was very exicted as this was the one thing she had been meaning to get for a while! We thought that we would do it at our son’s birth but, you know, COVID! We made arrangements for the photoshoot to be llama llama theme and we planned our matching outfits and got new ones for our son. My wife had also ordered a bunch of 12-18month outfits. As is customary, I put all the new clothes to wash and thought I was all set for the photoshoot day. On the day of, I was looking through the wash pile for the planned outfits and could not find them! I spent 30 minutes searching for them and have no idea were they were. Infact, 3 days on, I still don’t know where they are. In my mind a false memory of me washing the clothes was generated and I told my wife we were all set for the day. Imagine my wifes disappointment 😐 ,especially, since she had been looking forward to this for so long. Because of the snafu, we got delayed going to the photoshoot by an hour and did not have time to print our son’s milestone card on the way to the shoot as we had planned. Luckily the photographer was kind enough to accomodate our delayed start. We ended up getting some amazing pictures from the shoot that we will be printing to adorn some of the walls in our house

While the day was a chaotic one, the most important thing is, we had an unforgettable experience and a memorable day with those memories captured for us to relive over and over!

Personal: Shoes, what’s the big deal?

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Pandemic has resulted in such novel experiences for new borns that they think that’s how things normally are. For example, in my son’s world view, wearing a mask is the norm or may be even fashion 🙂 since everyone he meets outside wears one and his parents, when they venture out, wear one too! Another thing that my son wasn’t used to until recently was shoes! Our son started walking a couple of months ago but the fact that the only places he ventured to until recently was doctor appointments meant that he hadn’t had the need for shoes. We got him shoes prior to our visit to the zoo coulpe of weeks ago, but when we tried to get him to put them on he was scared of them and started crying. We decided that he wouldn’t need the shoes for the zoo visit as the weather was bad and we did not expect him to be out of his stroller.

To get him to get used to wearing shoes, I put them on him (he was crying for a bit when I did that) and then took him to the park near our house. I put him on the ground to walk and he *would not budge*! He was unsure of taking a step and would frequently sit down on the ground trying to remove the shoes. After unsuccesfully trying for a bit, I brought him back home and let the shoes be still on. After a bit of fussing, he started walking in them. Still unsure, still wobbling – reminded me of how dogs react when you put them in shoes 🙂

After a while, I took the shoes off and decided to give it a try again the next day. Same thing happened again. He cried when I put the shoes on and wasn’t ready to walk in the park. Just stood there. This, was until our neighbours kids showed up and started running around, playing soccer in the park. Once they showed up, all my son wanted to do was run towards them. He completely forgot that he was wearing shoes that he did not like 🙂 .Here is the proof!

Was planning to take him out today again but its that PNW weather – cold, gray and rainy. Let’s see how he does when I take him out to the park again soon.

Personal: Mountain Biking with friends!

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Yesterday was an eventful day. My wife was gracious enough to manage our kid for a few hours (not that she doesn’t on other days 🙂 . She does most of the work anyway and still allowed me to go and have fun while she was with the baby ) and I went Mountain biking with a few friends. Later on, we, as a family, went on a stroll in the park where we met up another family. Finally, we were hoping to round out the night by watching a movie in our home theater but the chores took longer than expected so we just ended up watching a movie in the living room.

As for Mountain biking, this is the second time during the pandemic that I went Mountain Biking. First was when we had a 5 hour session few months ago with some basic training and then biking on easy trails. We liked the experience so we decided to go again this past saturday. The weather was nice and a couple of more friends joined us. We headed back to Duthie Hill Mountain BIke Park and decided to go through the same trails as last time just because we were familiar with them and wanted to make sure that the friends who were doing this for the first time were comfortable as well. We ended up spending close to three hours biking covering over 6.5miles. Here is a screenshot of a part of our journey through the trails:

Map of the trail

I did also capture our biking adventure with my camera. Here is a short video from the over half hour of footage that I captured:

MTB Adventure

While it was a fun and eventful Saturday with several hours of intense activity, recovery from it is another matter. Especially since the mountain biking happened after several months of physicial inactivity. That’s why today is what we call sore Sunday 🙂

Here are a few more videos from the day: