Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Milo

So all week Milo has been a dream baby. He has been sleeping five, sometimes even six hour stretches at night, which, from what I understand about the Ways of The North American Infant, is highly unusual and makes up a tiny bit for that irksome 36-hour labor. He's been giggling and cute, eating when he's supposed to eat and sleeping when he's supposed to sleep. That changed yesterday, when we made the massive mistake of inviting people not related to us over to the house.

Milo had been throwing us the highlights from his bag of tricks all morning - smiling, loving the rotating starfish on his bouncy seat, smacking the crap out of the hanging plastic parts on his activity mat - until Sam and Lisa showed up, at which point he decided to scream, fuss, and generally act like he was extremely unsatisfied with the parents that life had dealt him.

Every day is ... not so much an adventure, more like a grueling hike up a mountain that sometimes offers nice views. Which makes it extremely hard to plan or anticipate anything. And for me, this is one of the toughest parts of parenthood. Because I love to plan. I like to plan what I'm doing in three hours; I like to plan what I'm doing in three months or three years. And I like to put it in spreadsheet format. But now planning is next to impossible because we have no idea what Milo will be like on a minute-to-minute basis.

This all came to a head over the past few weeks as I tried to plan a trip for us in May. My brother is getting married in L.A., and we're going to plan our first family vacation around the wedding. Which is impossible, because by then Milo will be six months old and I haven't a clue what a six-month-old, let alone this particular six-month-old, is like. Will he like to zoo? Playing on the beach? Will he adjust to the time change or will he be pissed off and fussy the entire time? I don't even know what he'll be eating and when he'll be sleeping. It would be easier to plan a vacation with a chimpanzee, because at least then I could call the zoo and find out what chimps are generally like.

But tickets need to be purchased and plans need to be made, so after an uncharacteristic three weeks spent debating minutia (will he need his own seat on the plane? do we book a single room or a suite? do we bring the car seat? the pack and play? will we need to buy a steamer trunk to haul all of our crap?) I finally made some executive decisions and booked the trip. At the very least it will be, dare I say it, an adventure.