Sienna Travels: Part 1 - Poole & Meeting Grandparents

Wow. Where do I start? We've made several trips back to the UK since our move to Australia nearly 5 years ago, but this one was rather special. There are not many things that would tempt me to spend 24 hours on a plane with a 7 month old, but introducing Sienna to my parents was one of them. Dad said he thought the day would never arrive, but on 6th May it finally did :-)

In 18 days we saw 63 people, and as you can imagine there are a lot of photographs to share and stories to tell. So, I'll break this up over several posts.

The first story of the trip - our flight - I am not going to share. A bit like a birth story, flying with a baby is not something I wish to remember every detail about, so lets gloss over the horrors and just remember the delightful ending. Just like giving birth, maybe one day the scars will heal and I'll be brave enough to fly with a baby again... until then, lets remember that WE MADE IT!

We started the trip with three days in Poole to introduce Sienna to the delights of her mother's and father's homeland (this primarily comprised Sainsbury's), and have some good bonding time with her Granny Pam and Grandad.

With Granny Pam

With Grandad

This outtake makes me laugh!

Just reviewing these photos again makes me so excited for our next trip! (See, I've forgotten about the flight already!!)

Peepo!

It was so wonderful to see her little face light up as Grandad popped up from behind the sofa / around the door exclaiming 'Peepo!' for the hundredth time! For a while we think Sienna thought her name was Peepo...

The jet lag was surprisingly easy to deal with on the way over (focusing on the positives here), and Sienna had a couple of great sleeps to allow me to recover slightly myself.  Granny Pam had collected lots of baby items at her house for our use - some kindly leant by Tom's family, other items excitingly purchased in anticipation of our arrival. It made things really easy to have a ready made kit available on arrival.

Three short days went incredibly quickly and before we knew it we were packing Grandad's car and off on the long drive to Norwich... which is another blog! We've only covered meeting 2/63 in this post, but I promise to pick up the pace a little bit in the next entry. Until then....