Penelope's First Big Trip

To bring Penelope home with us, we have to get her a passport, which can only be issued from the US Embassy in London. When I went to schedule an appointment, I got an e-mail Friday evening that the only appointment available was Monday (yesterday) afternoon at 2pm. So we spent the weekend gearing up for Penelope's first big trip - three hours on the train, a nice little subway ride and walk through London. Previously, I'd only taken Penny a couple of blocks over to the Grainger Market and even that was tiring on my still-recovering muscles.

We got to do a long-term trial of the Moby Wrap baby carrier Aunt Helen brought over from the US. Works quite well -- Penelope stayed asleep whenever she was in it, though she did come out looking like she needed to reinflate for a few minutes. We also did our first trial of the diaper bag. The only thing I seemed to have forgotten was what I put in the bag and where. The bag was so heavy that Dan had to carry it everywhere. It was an incredibly tiring day because it was the longest I'd been out in a while and I've still got a bit of healing to do. However, it was all worth it because we now have a consular report of birth abroad, Penny's passport will be mailed back to us in a few weeks so we can leave by mid-December instead of at Christmas, and she'll have a social security number by January. We even had some time leftover so we could visit the arthropod exhibit at the Natural History Museum. Overall, a great trip.

We had our first Health Visitor appointment today. I love having medical professionals visit me instead of having to go to their office. Penelope now weighs 7.14lbs and has grown out of the preemie diapers (more for poo quantity than butt size). She wasn't thrilled about having to be weighed without any clothes and lodged a urinary protest (though she didn't cry through the whole procedure, despite being woken from a nap). Generally, both Penny and I are doing fine and slowly figuring out how to work together. We're definitely going to continue to work together on our traveling, though, because going home and then to Grenada should be considerably more complicated than our little London trip.