Blog on the Wed

Blog on the Wed

So, for the last year, I have been looking forward to attending one of my best friends weddings. She’s Austrian and had planned a beautiful multi-ceremony and wedding feast in a gorgeous historical castle in the Wood Quarters of Austria. It was to be our first trip on the airplane with the baby, except SURPRISE! My husband just got hired for his new job in London and would be flying in a few days later…so, just the two of us, our two bags, a car seat and a terrible cheap stroller we bought last minute at Argos(ask me why he bought it there- I told him, everything I’ve ever bought there has broken). This stroller didn’t break though because I threw it out with great joie de vivre before we moved from Switzerland. Had we not been in a country full of clean freak informers, I would have most enjoyed throwing it from the balcony or rolling over it with the car a few times first…

So, back to the trip. To get to our fabulously glamourous fun time away, we (again read baby and me) had to take a cab to the airport, check –in, walk to the plane, be attached with a special seatbelt on the plane, we were not allowed to take said stroller on board and it was not waiting for us upon arrival…so, we (read I) got our luggage, pushed luggage trolley and stroller simultaneously through customs and out to lobby while holding a wiggly LOUD baby. We then met our friend Petra, who took us in her car to the train station, then we went through the same routine to get on and off the train, then FINALLY we were met at the station in nowhere (a.k.a. Moldau) Austria by my Tante Hilde and finally driven to her home, where all I wanted to do was sleep..or perhaps cry softly in a corner. However, because it is the woodquarters and people are REALLY REALLY wonderful. There were lots of people waiting to see us and catch up and feed us and –you get the drift. Finally, Gracie who hadn’t slept all day-she seems to have my fear of missing anything gene-finally she seemed to want to go to sleep. But because it was a strange place(or so I thought) our ‘angel’ who usually sleeps beautifully through the night, woke repeatedly on an hourly basis and woke extra early for some ‘quality time’ with mommy! You can imagine I was slightly tired at this point. Sadly, this continued for the two days till my husband came. I thought this would make things better and finally she slept through the night. I didn’t know what had come over her!

Then the day of the wedding, she started crying and crying and crying –through both civil and religious ceremony and through the salad course, fish course, game course and all of the desert courses (hey, I told you it was an Austrian wedding-it’s just not a proper Austrian wedding without a few desert courses or atleast a few entre-course chocolate opportunities!!!). Anyway, she wore us out and we finally gave in and left the wedding before the dancing had even begun – I couldn’t take it. On the way home,I thought what has happened to my angel baby? Is this the future? Is this a cruel phase? We got to the hotel and again she woke every hour screaming! We kept thinking –is it the new place? New cot? Is she too cold? Too hot? Too freaked from new surroundings? Are we moving her around too much?

We somewhat apologetically said ‘goodbye’ to our hosts and drove to Vienna. As I sat in the airport and watched what I thought to be Paul’s plane flying back to London, I looked down and saw IT staring back at me sharply...there IT was! A toothy little grin coming from our baby! She had a tooth! A perfect pearly lovely little ‘toofy’!!!! And she was showing it off to me!

Post notice-since she’s the first child, we tend to get carried away with everything –so after immediately interrupting my husband’s take off by calling with the news I’ll admit I tried to photo the tooth with my phone but common decency must have stopped us because the baby refused to show her ‘toof’ to the telephone.