aquarium trip gone awry

All I want to do right now is curl up in bed and take a long, long nap.  Instead, I'm wading through a backlog of pictures from the past couple weeks, trying to get through some of the sorting/tagging/uploading while I have a chance.  Zach's about to be gone a lot of the coming week, and I don't want to keep falling further behind than I already am.

My house may be a mess and it may take me a good week to actually put away clean laundry, but god forbid my pictures not be up-to-date (we all have our priorities, don't we?).

It's been really nice having Zach be, well, not working, though somehow it's gotten pretty busy around here.  Wednesday evening was lovely, I got together with a few mom friends and sat around the hot tub sipping drinks and chatting.  Then yesterday Zach, Donovan, and I drove down to Monterey to spend the afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  It's a long enough drive that we decided to splurge on a hotel room and spend the night.

I've been to the Monterey aquarium a few times before, and I have always loved it. It's beautifully built, in a beautiful place, and I never tire of watching all the different sea creatures.  I am so fascinated by how different life looks underwater, and the completely different and sometimes completely odd adaptations that have developed to fit that way of life.  D's been to a couple of smaller aquariums and seemed just as fascinated, so I was really excited to share this with him.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was kind of a disaster.  For whatever reason, yesterday he was in the most awful, foul mood, all day long.  Anything we suggested was met with an angry, loud "NO!" He refused to walk in the direction we asked him to.  If we tried to pick him up and carry him instead, he'd scream and wriggle and throw a fit.  The kicker is we'd finally get him to whatever it was we were trying to show him, and he'd instantly calm down and be totally interested.  But yeah, it made for a very frustrating visit.  Thankfully the aquarium has several areas that are designed for kids to just play in, so towards the end of the day we just took turns letting D play in one of them with one of us watching, and the other going off to check out whatever exhibits we wanted to steal a glance at.

It was not exactly the happy bonding experience I'd hoped for.  (I actually would say this has been our worst family trip to date.  Maybe I've gotten spoiled that D's been such a good traveller every other time...)

Thankfully we managed to get through a sit-down dinner (we picked a restaurant near an open area where we could take turns walking around with him), and bedtime went over semi-ok.  He woke up around 2am crying and saying something about "Donovan push lawnmower!" at which point Zach brought him into bed with us (yay for hotel room king beds), where he slept for another 3 hours before waking again.  This morning went slightly better, but not by a whole lot.  I'm really hoping this is a phase, because GOOD LORD I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.  Zach and I are both so worn out after just these past 2 days that I have zero guilt about sitting D in front of some videos while Zach takes a nap and I catch up on pictures/blogging.

BTW as a quick JobSearch2010 update: Zach's gotten one firm offer from the place in Michigan.  Monday he'll drive to Sacramento to talk to another company (though it looks like they won't have any openings till June which doesn't work too well for us), and then Wednesday & Thursday he's heading out to New Jersey for an interview.  It's looking quite likely that we might be going to Michigan, but we'll have to wait and see if anything else pops up. I'm both excited and a bit terrified about all this.