A little trip to Guerneville

Paul and I are super lucky to work for companies that have extremely generous parental leave policies. My leave is 16 weeks, and Paul's is actually 17 weeks. Facebook is one of the only companies out here that does equal leave for men and women (mostly on the premise that everyone should "Lean In")... even Google doesn't do something as generous. Before Patrick arrived, Paul and I decided that he would do 8 weeks at the start, and he would take the rest of his leave when Patrick is a little older. The leave just needs to be taken within Patrick's first year.

It's hard to believe but on Monday, Patrick will be seven weeks old, which means we only have one more week to fully soak up time with Dad. We'll both be really sad to see him go back to work, but luckily Paul has a lot of flexibility in his work schedule so we know we'll still see lots of him.

Our good friends who recently had their first baby strongly urged us to take a take a fun trip before Paul went back to work. We tossed around a bunch of ideas (I have a lot of time on my hands to do research about vacations during Patrick's multiple hours of feedings per day). In fact, vacation research is my second favorite way to stay up during those middle of the night feedings behind eating cookies. During one of my night feedings, I stumbled across a cool looking modern house in Guerneville with a pool and a hot tub on Airbnb, which looked lovely, so we booked it for Wednesday and Thursday nights of this past week.

On Wednesday morning, we woke up, and tag teamed hanging out with Patrick and packing. Patrick was in a very chipper mood and treated us to a bunch more smiles (something he hadn't done since July 4th). We were ready this time with both the cell phone camera and the nice camera.

Once we finished the photoshoot, we loaded up the car and started our journey to Guerneville. Guerneville is an adorable woodsy town on the Russian river about a two hour drive north. We thought it might be fun to stop at one of our favorite sandwich spots in the city, Boys Deli, and have a little picnic as a pit stop. Since it was a weekday, we were able to easily find a spot with OK views.

We wrapped up the picnic and had an easy rest of the drive. We spent the next two days soaking up the fresh air, relaxing by the pool, taking dips in the hot tub, trying some new restaurants (Hole in the Wall in Sebastabpol was our favorite), sipping some wine (but not too much), and playing with Patrick.

Over the past week, Patrick has become a lot more alert and is really starting to interact with his surroundings, which has been fun. A week ago, he gave us a 6 hour stretch of sleep at night (which was incredible). Though he hasn't repeated that, we think we're on the brink of more sleep in another week or two :) Another big moment - he now loves his swing and can fall asleep in it. Being able to fall asleep somewhere other than our arms is A-OK with us!

Here are some more pics from the trip!