Our Next Adventure: Baby Evelyn
On June 2nd our perfect little angel arrived.
Baby Evelyn came into our lives right on time (on her due date, to be exact)…she is already punctual, just like her mama!
Welcome, Baby Evelyn!
I can’t believe that was 6 weeks ago! Life has been a whirlwind since she was born. Matt’s mom came to stay with us for the first week baby Ev was home, giving us some much needed rest. Immediately after, Matt went on a 3 day business trip, leaving me and Ev all to our lonesome. Sleepless and exhausted, I thought those 3 days would never end.
Then, once Matt was back, more family came in to visit for a week to help relieve some stress and do some home cooking. With all the visitors, we were just starting to get into a routine by week 4 when it was time for us to make our first family trip to California. Yep, flying with a 4 week old baby seems like a good idea, right?! Why would we plan such a trip so soon, you ask?
Well, right around the time we were awaiting Ev’s arrival, Matt received a very exciting job offer…in Palo Alto, California. We had lived in southern California for almost 5 years before finally settling in Omaha and building our home, so we had no intentions of moving back. But the company offered a great opportunity: Matt would go back to doing what he loves, helping manage the construction of a huge healthcare project at Stanford Medical Center.
The great part about the job was that he would work from home 50% of the time. The caveat was that the time he was not working from home, he would need to travel to Palo Alto to meet with the team and take care of things on site. That meant being gone every other week.
It sounded crazy, but to sweeten the deal, the company would help pay for Ev and I to visit occasionally, as well as a rental so Matt (and Ev and I) would have a consistent, comfortable place to stay while in California. We stewed on it for quite a while, weighing the pros and cons, but eventually we decided this would be an amazing opportunity for us and just couldn’t pass it up.
I was pretty nervous about the impending trip and spent hours reading every blog I could find on traveling with an infant. But after it was all said and done, it wasn’t so bad at all, and Ev did a great job on her first plane ride. She slept almost the whole way there and back!
So this is where we are. In a tiny little cottage behind a duplex in Menlo Park, Ev and I are kicking back and putting together the last of the IKEA furniture we bought to furnish the place, making this little cottage our temporary home away from home. It’s still to be determined just how often Evelyn and I will be able to travel out here with Matt, but being in a beautiful area of Silicon Valley and just a quick train ride away from San Francisco sure does make it worth the extra effort of hauling a newborn halfway across the country.
So back to baby Evelyn. She is getting bigger and bigger by the minute and has changed so much already. This week she started lots of smiling, cooing, and is making more eye contact, so it feels like she may actually know who we are now.
She is so precious, smiling when I kiss her cheeks or tickle her face with my hair. It has been challenging for sure (especially when she was crying uncontrollably in our hotel room for 3 hours the first night we got to California!), but I love our little peanut so much, and can’t wait for our baby jetsetter to develop her own personality, shaped by our family adventures!
