Salida, CO Road Trip

CO Road Trip Sept. 2012

Our friends Rachel and Glenn had a wedding party in Salida this weekend (they got married on a hike in Alaska, but wanted to celebrate with friends) and we turned it into a good excuse for a family road trip to see the fall colors throughout Colorado.  We headed up and over Kenosha Pass on the way there and stopped for a quick hike.  We had Pongo with us and between him and the two kids, frequent stops were helpful.  Pongo hurt his leg about a week ago and has stitches in his leg so he had to take it easy, but it's a good thing we were planning on bringing him anyway since we couldn't have left him with anybody else this weekend.  We found a great hotel in Salida that allowed dogs and Pongo behaved very well the whole weekend.
On the way home we went through Canon City (prison city, USA) and stopped to see the Royal Gorge.  We must have been about a week past "high season" at the Gorge because the entire place felt like an abandoned amusement park!  It was a very weird scene.  But, a very cool thing to see as well.  Even Pongo got to walk over the big bridge.
It was a lot of driving over 2 days but the girls did great.  Sabrina has figured out how to completely zone out in the car by watching shows on the iPad.  Her favorites are still Dora the Explorer & Olivia.  She still gets a little grumpy after watching too much TV, so it's still not our favorite mode of hers, but it has kept her from getting carsick several times now and she'll hang in there for a long car ride so we're going with it.
Sabrina is an incredible "Daddy's Girl" these days and is pretty much attached to him at the hip.  It's somewhat necessary since I'm dealing with Kali so much (and Brent's pretty bad at nursing, it turns out), but it's also getting to be a bit of a problem.  After a long day in the car Sunday without a nap, Sabrina had a pretty major meltdown and was downright nasty to me before going to bed.  I try to tell myself that she's just a silly 2 year old, but the fact is that it's pretty hard to feel like I can't connect with her anymore.  She seems angry with me almost all the time and I'm thinking that it must have to do with Kali, but she just can't verbalize that yet.  However, Brent is probably more fun and more patient than me too, so that certainly contributes!!  So we're addressing it and trying to even things up a bit if we can because neither of us want another blow up like we had Sunday night.  I hope it's just a phase that will get better once Kali is a bit less time consuming, but perhaps by changing a few things on a daily basis will help.  Brent has been taking Kali to daycare this week so I can take Sabrina...just trying to split things up differently when we can instead of always defaulting to him with Sabrina and me with Kali.  I've also noticed that Sabrina and I do just fine if Brent's not around, but as soon as he's there, she only wants him and treats me much worse.  Like I said, we're working on it and I hope it's just a phase.

Kali has really gotten over her hatred of the car these days.  She was a great sport all weekend and only had a few stints of persistent crying.  Usually if she cried it was because she was hungry or tired and she was easy to soothe.  A few times it went on for a while, but nothing like her early days of flipping out in the car.  We're so glad that phase seems to be behind us.  Kali is also an amazing sleeper right now.  I can't believe that I can put her in her crib, all swaddled up, and she'll look up at me, smile and turn her head to the side and go to sleep for the entire night.  Are you kidding?  It's awesome.  I'm sure it won't last forever, but I'm enjoying every single night that it does!