Giants Parade 2012

This Halloween was a day of many firsts for Baby Claire. She went on her first BART ride, went to her first parade and wore her first costume. I must admit, two out of these three items kept me up the night before. What if the noise and crowds on BART made her scream the whole way into the City? What if I had to change her diaper in downtown SF in the middle of a crowd? How was feeding her while standing in a giant crush of people going to work out? What if the noise of the parade made her cry the whole time? There were a million things that could go wrong with our plan to take her with us to the Giants parade, but I tried to head many of them off by making sure our backpack was well packed the night before with exactly the things we would need, and none of the things we wouldn't. Carrying around extra weight wasn't going to make the day any better.

Luckily, as I should have known, Claire was a champ. Our friend Casey had to throw himself into the closing doors of BART to get us on, but there was just enough room for the four of us. Claire started to fuss a little when it started to get hot, but once I took off her sweater she was fine. She had a good time throwing herself back to gaze at Casey upside down, and she was very interested in the pony tail of the woman standing next to us. Luckily for us she found Claire grabbing a handful of her hair amusing. Claire just wanted to touch, not pull. In fact, I think the BART conductor lady could have used a visit from Claire. She did not appreciate the people who, like us, were stopping the doors from closing at every stop. I kept waiting for her to threaten to turn the train around.

Once we got into SF Claire was happy to just watch the people and take in the sights. When we finally picked a spot to stand our first test happened, Claire needed to be fed her solids. Just as I was about to pull her pineapple guava and spoon out of the backpack, a couple of young women walked up with a box of Plum Organics baby food packs. They were handing them out as a promotional thing and it was like a gift from God, or at least I felt that way once  I got over the weirdness of offering my child something that a stranger on the street gave me. The little pouch is the perfect way to quickly and cleanly feed your kid when you are standing in a large crowd. I didn't even have to take her out of her carrier. I am going to be picking up a handful of packets next time I'm at Target so I can throw a few of these in my diaper bag next time we're going to be on the go, on a long car trip or on those days when I am running out the door and forgot to defrost some baby food (this happens more often than I'd like to admit). No messy spoon to deal with afterwards and fewer spills. Its also shelf stable so I can just have them in the pantry and they'll be there when I need them. Here ends the commercial for Plum Organics ;-)

Once the parade actually started, Claire fell asleep on Jeff. Oh that's another first, Jeffry wore Claire for the first time! He kept a hand over her exposed ear in case someone next to us got too loud and she slept through the whole thing. She even got pegged in the head with a chocolate that someone in the parade threw out into the crowd (it had bounced off my shoulder and lost a lot of its speed). She barely opened her eyes, and Jeffry and I got a tasty treat to share.

Claire didn't seem to mind that she missed the parade. Hopefully we will have the chance to go to another Giants parade when Claire is older and can get excited to see her favorite players from atop Jeffry's shoulders. At least we learned that given proper planning, a store of food packets, and the use of very absorbent disposable diapers we can bundle her up along with us on our adventures!