Tom and I left for Palm Desert on October 2, Lacey's seven month birthday. This was our second flight with Lacey, and I felt just as nervous for this one as I did for the first one. Our first flight with Lacey was only about an hour long, and this one was three hours. A lot can go wrong in three hours!
Thankfully, Lacey handled this flight just as well as the first. Tom managed to get her to fall asleep on him for about an hour.
When she woke up, she went about charming everyone in the seats around us. Everyone was telling us how cute she was, and how she was such a good baby. When she wasn't making friends with our seat neighbours, she was playing with a plastic cup that a flight attendant gave her.
The flight went really well. All of our bags arrived, we picked up our rental car, and headed to the car. And here is where things started to fall apart... We arrived at our hotel before official check-in time, and there were no rooms available early. We had been counting on being able to put Lacey down for a nap immediately, but that wasn't possible. So we decided to drive around to kill some time, and we hoped that driving would lull Lacey to sleep. Instead she had a full-fledged meltdown, and we ended up having to pull over so we could take her out of her car seat and rock her. She eventually fell asleep, but it was a long afternoon!
The following day, we went to the Living Desert, which is a zoo. We stuck to the African exhibit, and wandered around, pointing out sleeping animals (bat-eared foxes, hyenas, warthogs) to Lacey. We're not really sure if she knew what she was looking at (or saw all of them), but she seemed to be having a good time looking around, regardless.
We saw a tortoise. Has anyone else noticed that tortoises are sort of menacing looking? Also, their scaly legs look very dinosaur-esque.
We saw some pretty birds. Possibly some sort of crane? I can't remember.
We tracked down some meerkats. Although there was only one. I guess the other ones were inside sleeping. But the one meerkat was more than happy to pose for me.
But the best part was that I fed a giraffe! We donated five dollars and got some carrot sticks from some volunteers. The giraffes come up and take the carrots right out of your hands! They use their big, long blue tongues to wrap around the carrots and grasp them. It felt sort of sandpapery, like a cat tongue.
Lacey was DEFINITELY very interested in the giraffe!
The giraffe was also an opportunist. Once the carrots were gone, there was no reason to hang around. I took a little too long taking pictures, and it started to wander off, until the volunteers coaxed it back with more carrots.
Here's a shot with the big blue tongue hanging out!
By the time we left the zoo, it was pretty hot, so we grabbed some lunch, got Lacey down for a nap, and when she woke up, we headed to the pool! I make it sound like this was a breezy event. And in the past when it was just Tom and I, it would have been. But when I say we "headed to the pool", I mean we spent 45 minutes applying sunscreen, diapering Lacey in disposable waterproof diapers, layering her into a reusable swim diaper, struggling to squeeze her into a bathing suit, trying to find her hat, and packing all her crap into a backpack, while she attempted to crawl away, and put up a major fight about getting diapered. So once we "breezed" through that process, we headed to the pool.
This was Lacey's first time in the water, and she was very interested in all the comings and goings of people on the pool deck, as well as splashing around in the water. She has her serious face on, but she enjoyed her first dip in the pool! She had a bit of a reaction to either the chlorine or the sunscreen, so we didn't stay long.
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