Melt downs and quiet days

Yesterday was a very quiet day. In fact, it has been the first day in a very long time that we have not left the house. It was warm and sunny and glorious outside, and so we took advantage in the morning before it got overwhelmingly hot, and took Juniper in the back yard for an extended amount of time. Our goal was not just to have her in the nice fresh air, but also to allow her little bum to go diaper free for as long as we could. She doesn't yet have a full fledged diaper rash, I don't think (as it doesn't appear to bother her), but there are enough little red spots that we thought it would be a good idea to let her air out. So we did just that. She seemed to enjoy herself immensely, especially because she was able to pee and poop multiple times without a diaper, and go through a ridiculous amount of blankets. Her crowning glory was some projectile poop all over her father (right after I had warned him that she was probably due for a poop, and had been ignored, in case anyone was wondering).

The quiet day was kind of a necessity, as she had had a couple of pretty over-stimulating days in a row, and was due for some respite. In particular, Wednesday was a little too intense for her... we spent the afternoon in Bedford and Sackville, at a couple of baby-type stores I had been wanting to go to. I desperately need some nice, staple pieces of nursing gear, and I also wanted to check out some stuff for Juniper - most importantly, a convertable car seat that we had been meaning to get for some time. She has been using an infant car seat up until this point (we bought it cheap from a collegue of Clark's, and therefore knew it was safe despite being second-hand), but we had known all along that we wanted to actually invest in a seat that would last her until she could be front facing (babies notoriously grow out of infant car seats before they are actually ready or supposed to move onto front-facing seats). So we bit the bullet and bought one... we may end up using it right away, or we may wait until she gets a little bit bigger. We'll see.

Then we drove back to Halifax, picked up an order of Thai food, and brought it back to Carroll and Stephen's. En route to get the Thai, Juniper had meltdown #1. She was hungry, trapped in a car seat, and as hard as I tried, I could not manage to safely get breast to mouth with her in her seat and the car moving. So there were some pretty heart-breaking wails that we all had to endure until she found her fist for awhile, then until we got to Carroll's. Then it was Juniper's very first dinner party, with a whole bunch of people who were very happy to see her and hang out with her, and Juniper was relatively happy there, but then on the way home again, she had meldown #2. It was amazing, however... when we got home, her piercing wails turned off immediately when we walked in the door, almost as though she sensed being home again, and could finally relax.

Anyway, we have a whole lot more to post at this point, because Juniper has now met a whole lot of very inportant people in the last two days - her paternal grandmother (Deborah), her aunt Liz and her aunt Faye, and her great grantparent's Ron and Elizabeth Wybou.