We all had a decent sleep overnight, Nicol wasn’t too restless and didn’t keep us waking every 10 minutes whenever she moved, like Andres did when we first got him – although we were new parents at the time and completely terrified!
This morning, the owner of the hotel offered to take the three families staying here to the Sugar Cane Museum on the other side of Palmira, in the middle of sugar cane country in this area.
It was a nice opportunity to get out of the hotel and see some things, and since Nicol seemed quite settled with us, we thought it would be a good idea.
A mini-van picked us up at 9am and we headed out of town. It took nearly an hour and a half to get to the museum – Nicol slept a lot of the way and Andres had a snooze on my lap too.
Of course, as soon as we started our tour, Nicol insisted on having a bottle, so we had to juggle bottles and formula to get her fed.
Andres was feeling a bit tired and grumpy, so I ended up carrying him on my shoulders most of the tour, which lasted about an hour and a half. Before we left for Colombia, I knew this might happen – especially with Nicol stealing a lot of his attention. I had prepared for it somewhat by carrying him more frequently on my shoulders to exercise my shoulders and I’ve got to the point now where such long walks with him up there aren’t so bad. The main trick I found was to relax the shoulders – made it far less painful! Given he weighs over 16kg and I had a backpack with another 8-9kg on, it was a heavy load, but I wasn’t really uncomfortable.
However, I did have to ask Andres to sit still a couple of times while I was trying to take photos with the SLR (holding his legs down with my arms while my hands held the camera up to my face).
You can read more about the Sugar Cane Museum from my journal written in 2009 when we visited the day before meeting Andres: Day 5 – Sugar Cane Museum
We headed back to Cali just after noon and got back in time for a late lunch. It was an exhausting morning and we were all a bit tired and grumpy.
We’ve had trouble finding things for Nicol to eat at meal times. According to the staff at Chiquitines, she has been eating pureed fruit and soup, but there must be something in the texture or the type of soup which is different to what we’ve been trying. We even tried mixing a bit of Farex infant cereal in to thicken it up into a paste, but she just doesn’t seem interested. We’ll keep trying.
Here is a time-lapse video of our drive home from the Sugar Cane Museum, back to Cali. Unfortunately I filled the memory card before we got half-way home, so it’s only about 40 minutes of capture (compressed into just over 4 minutes):
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