San Francisco Trip

I have to say that I LOVE San Francisco! Even though it is only two hours away, we had only gone once before. That was when I was over 8 months pregnant so it really wasn't all that fun. Well, it was, but walking around just made me swell up and I felt so slow...especially walking anything uphill. So it was nice to go and have maya with us ( no longer in my tummy, but in the stroller).
It has been tough doing stuff with Maya since she is so grouchy, but its getting to the point where we are sick of staying at home and want to go out and do stuff, and she is getting happier, so this was her first day trip. Plus I know I am not the only person in the world who has a fussy baby so I just have to buck up and learn how to deal with her.
We left in the morning when Maya went down for her nap so we could travel in peace. It worked for a while but 20 minutes away she woke up and started screaming. We thought-ok that isn't too bad, we can handle it for 20 min. easy, but then we couldn't find parking for less than 30 bucks for the longest time, so it took another 25 min to park-by that time she was one mad baby! On the bright side, we did find parking for eleven dollars! :) -but that was probably the only upside.
Once we got all the baby stuff out of the car (people always told me you have to have a ton of stuff when you travel with a baby-but I had no idea it would be that bad for a day trip. We needed all sorts of warm clothes and a hat and all that because San Francisco can get quite cold.) we went straight over to Pier 39 and went to the Sea Lion Restaurant and had clam chowder in a sour dough bread bowl. Ryan pretty much introduced me to sourdough bread because his family eats it all the time, and even though Im not a big seafood fan, I do love clam chowder.
The Blue Angles were performing that day-which is cool because I got to see there show in mtn. home at Ryans house only a few weeks ago, and I think that jets doing tricks is one of the coolest things to watch. The coolest things they did (which both me and ryan missed sadly) but they had one of there bigger planes fly under the golden gate bridge. That is so cool!
Afterwards we did some browsing around at all the shops and I got the cutest San Francisco sweater for really cheap, and we bought Maya an "escaped from alcatraz" outfit. We have decided that will be her halloween outfit. I wanted her to be a lobster but she isn't big enough for the outfit. Then I wanted her to be a tootsie roll, but knowing her-I dont think she would like something like that because she hates having things on her head. So we are just sticking with that. Maybe I can spike her hair with some gel or something and rub dirt on her face...I dunno....
Our last stop was Ghiradelli square where we bought chocolate trolleys (which were amazing) and split a sundae that had cheesecake and strawberries and blueberries. The coolest part of that was that they had chocolate blueberries on top that looked just like fresh blueberries! At that point Maya started crying-I knew she was tired but she wouldn't go to sleep. So after about 30 min of sitting on a bench with her, she finally gave in a took a nap.
We bundled her up in the stroller and started walking back to where we parked-which was quite a ways away, and for those of you who have been there you know how intense the hills can be! Luckily I had Ryan with me so I made him do all the pushing of the stroller while I just had to get myself up the steep roads. Man, am I out of shape...
We accidentally went up 1 road to many so we had to go back down, but it was one of the steepest roads of all...I just though, "how in the world are we going to get the stroller down that with maya in it? she was asleep and since sleep is so precious I couldn't bear to wake her up." We ended up having to go down it with the stroller backwards or she would have flown out and rolled down the hill... So I posted a picture of Ryan going down it with the stroller backwards and me standing at the bottom to show you how steep it was. Near the bottom there was a bush in the way so we had to carry it around that and the rest of the way down. It was great fun.
The drive home was doomed from the beginning....crying from the moment we put maya in the carseat. It was the beginning of her crying for an hour and fifteen minutes on the way home...it wasn't safe to stop anywhere in oakland, so we waited till we got past that and stopped at a Target. She was fine the moment we took her out of the carseat. I was even sitting in the back with her AND she had carseat toys and I know the straps weren't too tight, so go figure on why she hates it so much. If anyone has any advice on how to help babies enjoy the car more...feel free to leave a comment. :)