Back in the heat of July we sought out some air conditioning and had a "staycation" at the DTC Hyatts.
We definitely took advantage of the pool...
Despite the fact that Andrew was having a bit of a sleep regression, the first time all four of us slept in the same room went pretty well. I'm excited to travel again!
We took a short trip over to Indianapolis before Thanksgiving. It was Andrew's first flight as a Premier on United. Congrats, buddy!
We took the opportunity to visit our friends the T's who live in the Urbana-Champaign area. Believe it or not, Indianapolis is their closest major airport! It was a bonding time with our old friends now that we have a child and can talk with them on whole new levels. Unfortunately, Andrew was coming down with a cold, and we had a couple of really rough nights. But we made it through!
Ooh, new toys!
Puzzles with Evan and Nora
Learning to sit up is hard.
We then headed over to Kokomo to attend Aunt-to-be (ATB) Kathleen's bridal shower. It was fun to see family and to meet new family!
In fact it was exhausting. Thank God for Grandma!
We wrapped up our trip with a stay at the Hyatt Regency Downtown Indianapolis, with excellent views of the Indiana State Capitol.
This is my favorite nursing picture ever. My post-baby belly may be hanging out there, but this is my life!
An unfortunate coda to this trip: I left my wallet in the rental car and it was never recovered. Three days before leaving on an international vacation! AGH. I blame mommy brain. Not my brightest moment.
Earlier this week, Andrew helped Daddy with some Matlab code debugging:
After such hard work, he needed a bit of a break. We spent this weekend down in Denver at the Hyatts - part of a points-and-status earning deal, but also a little staycation for us and a chance to practice travel with a baby.
[Travis:]
Since we've generally enjoyed the perks that come with Hyatt Diamond status, we've generally been committed to requal-ing this year. With my work travel down significantly, we're scraping to get the required 25 stays this year, and angling for every possibility. Hyatt's (somewhat lame) spring promotion was called Possibilities, or something like that, and amounted to 10,000 bonus points after 5 stays. Pretty much a repeat of the Great 10K from the fall. Normally, this wouldn't be all that excited to us (compared to Faster Free Nights!), but we know we're going to need some mattress runs eventually, so we might as well do a few now while there are bonus points involved. When Hyatt ran a mediocre 48-hour sale in late May, we booked up 5 nights, at least 2 of which we could somewhat rationalize a need for.
Well, as luck would have it, Hyatt later announced the start of a separate, yet stackable, promotion with Southwest, whereby 5 Hyatt stays earned 19,000 Southwest points in their new Rapid Rewards program. Normally we could care less about WN and RR in general, but this promo, combined with the 10K promo, and the fact that we need some stays, made it pretty worthwhile. While we're not experts in the land of WN, 19k points seems to have a value of about $300 or so we're told. Valuing 10K Hyatt points at about 1.5 cpm is another $150 in value. (Of course, we also earned Diamond Amenity points for the stays, 3500 total.)
Not a bad deal. Of course, we really did need one of the rooms, so that adds about $50 of value to the package. And for our stay at the Hyatt DTC, Diamonds get breakfast at the buffet, which is really quite good (though probably not $15 good which is the retail price) and does factor into our calculations! Finally I'm 20% closer to Diamond next year and getting to do this all again.....
[/Travis]
Living it up at the HP
This was not his first stay at a hotel, but rather his third and fourth, the first of which I've been meaning to write about in a blogging backlog. But from our experience, it seems like Andrew sleeps extremely well in hotels, even better than at home. Maybe this means we need to purchase a Hyatt Grand Bed?
I was also able to almost-capture the smile, and get a video of his newfound voice and quiet playtime:
Also this weekend was the REI garage sale at the Downtown Denver location. We scored enough shoes to keep Andrew in Keens through early childhood:
And because of the silly rules at the downtown REI with regard to their garage sales, Andrew has now become the youngest REI member ever*:
Now we're back at home and ready to cheer on the Dallas Mavericks to the NBA championship with Katherine, Corey, and Frank. It's our boy's first party!
