Let me just take this opportunity to say, having my parents come with was one of the best ideas we’ve ever had. (Don’t tell them I said so.) Babies are great and I wouldn’t trade being a father for anything, but sometimes they can just be annoyingly needy.
Enter my parents–my dad annointed himself Henry’s daily bathgiver, and both parents helped out immensely with the changing, feeding, etc (they even took him to sleep in their room a couple of nights, which was really nice.)
Overall, it was an amazingly stress free trip–so much so that if I were to do it over again, I might have done more of it independently rather than rely on guides in Beijing and Xi’an (which was originally to allow more time for dealing with the baby.) Of course, I wouldn’t skip our wonderful hosts in Shanghai–thanks Mike and Beth for taking us in and showing us such a great time! We’re looking forward to visiting you sometime in the nearish future in Tokyo! (There will, of course, be more blog posts when it happens.)
