hachi’s new year // abegg adventures on film

Next week will mark Hachi’s first birthday, so I figured it was about time I started posting some photos of her on my blog; if anything, just so that I can look at her sweet baby face as much as possible in the coming days!

These photos are from a trip we took down the coast right after Hachi turned one month old. We’d already had her first camping trip into the mountains when she was 11 days old, but this was officially our first road trip together. This road trip started off with high hopes but ended just shy of the California border, and was a quick lesson to us on a few things; most notably how challenging it can be to drive long distances with a baby, and how important it is to remain flexible when it comes to kids. I’m sure so many people can relate to this scenario, where we would drive by some of our favorites stops and destinations, because she was sleeping… and Michael would despair because it felt like for the rest of our lives our road trips would be doomed! Which, as in many situations in parenting, makes it feel like the present is indicative of the forever future, even though the present is just that. The Present. And anything could change at any given moment; this goes for road trips, meals, crankiness, sleep patterns, appetite, poo situations, pee situations, or all of the above all at once. Recently I was telling my mom about a particularly grumpy crabby week that we were having, and she said, “And it feels like, ‘is this it? is it going to be like this for forever?!'” I thought she was so spot on, because sometimes as a parent we are so deep in it, that one moment feels like forever… and the irony there is that each moment is so painfully fleeting.

So, for Hachi’s first road trip we took her to the coast, and if anything, we got her around the sights, sounds, smells and discoveries of that which we hope will run deep within each of her heartbeats… that wonderful ocean blue. And we rung in Hachi’s first New Year to the deep resounding feel of waves crashing nearby, with a message to her sister where we all looked into the phone and said, “We LOVE You!”

The perfect start to the perfect year.