Fauxtographer Mom's Photo Blog: My Trip to North Carolina

Back in the second week of June, I went down to North Carolina. The main reason I went was to attend a tour for child passenger safety technicians of the Britax plant in Charlotte. Since I have family in NC, I drove down a day early (and the portable DVD player I bought "for Levi's birthday" was a God-send - I actually got it mostly to keep Jonas distracted so he wouldn't cry when he was bored in the car, and it worked really well) and stayed the night at my grandmother's house, and then my grandmother watched Levi for me while I went on the tour. I took Jonas with me since he is nursing and there's no way I would have been able to pump enough milk to leave him all day.

The tour was really, really neat. I got to see the assembly lines for the seats, the wear and tear testing on different components of the seats, and even a live crash test of one of the seats. It was fascinating for a car seat geek like me! My favorite part of the day: the president of the company joined our group on part of the tour and held Jonas! He said he loved babies and I looked like I had my hands full, so he'd love to take him. Who was I to say no to that?! That made my geeky day!

I spent one more night at my grandmother's (and we celebrated Levi's birthday a few days early with cupcakes for dessert) and headed home the next day. Before leaving, we stopped to visit with my 98 year old great grandmother (the boys' great-great grandmother), and my cousin, who lives next door to her, happened to be home on her lunch break, so I saw her too. She was a month away from her due date with her first baby, and she wanted me to look at her car seat, so I checked it for her.

That was leg 1 of my summer travels. More about legs 2 and 3 later! (I should also add that this trip started some pretty stressful sleep issues with Levi. He had gotten used to Daddy laying in his bed with him to go to sleep at night and absolutely refused to stay in his bed without someone laying with him. I stayed with him until he fell asleep the first night (after fighting with him for almost 2 hours) and then he woke up a few hours later and ended up in the twin bed Jonas and I were sharing. The next night I pulled out the trundle bed so we'd have more room if Levi came in, and my grandmother laid down with him to get him to sleep, but thankfully he stayed in his own bed all night. It was still nice to get the extra room.)

Oh, and of course I wouldn't leave you without pictures!

Levi blowing out the candles, (for the first out of three times that night - he didn't even care about the cupcakes, he just wanted to keep blowing out the candles! My little pyro...), birthday "party" 2 of 3