Sage strikes a pose.

 

Sage has been traversing the country for the past three weeks, spreading smiles, drool, and her passion for mismatched socks.  Ok, so she seems more passionate about taking the socks off her feet and shoving them into her drool filled mouth, making them soggy, and then dropping them on the floor with a splat.  Despite her appetite for a non-edible product, she is a wonderful spokesbaby and tirelessly displays her colorful feet while being carried around various convention centers, airports, and hotel lobbies across the country.

Solmate Socks is a company that my Mom started 10 year ago, and their niche is colorful mismatched socks for adults and kids.  Both Lisa and I have been involved in the product photography, website, and wholesale trade shows for the company for many years on a part time basis.  Now Lisa has been working full time for the company for the past three years, and I’ve been full time for a month.  Part of our job is to travel to wholesale trade shows around the country to display the product to wholesale buyers and write orders.  Another part of the job is to cart around Sage as the infant sock model; like a shorter, chubbier, breast-fed version of Kate Moss.  Like a supermodel, she turns heads everywhere she goes.  When walking through the aisles of a trade show you can the hear whispers of her adoring fans.  “Look at the sock-baby”, “sooo cute”, “what booth did she come from?”.  Her attraction spans all demographics, elderly grandmothers, gay men, and especially middle age women, who are reminded that their own babies are now insufferable teenagers, and they tell us exactly that.  I think I finally understand why someone would want to be part of a supermodel’s entourage.  The attention is addictive, Sage’s appearance turns heads, and although they aren’t looking adoringly directly at me, it is in my general direction, and that is close enough.

Centerfold

 

The only time she doesn’t draw the hungry eyes of fans is while boarding an airplane.  It would seem that her cuteness is best absorbed when the viewer can choose the length and proximity of their exposure.  It’s much like watching  solar eclipse, but instead of going blind the worst that can happen is extreme annoyance.  I understand exactly where the other passengers are coming from, since I have always been wary of being in confined spaces with anything potentially noisy, smelly, or regurgitating, which explains why I tend to avoid punk concerts or frat parties.  I too used to glare at babies boarding a plane, praying that they wouldn’t sit next to me, or worse yet, directly behind me, where they would kick the back of my seat and their screams would be a mere foot from my head and in surround sound.  So now when we board a plane I hold Sage high and let her look around and greet our neighboring passengers with a smile to warm their hearts to her presence.

So far she has been on 8 flights, which at 7 months old sets an impressive standard.  Most of them have been cross-country, and most have them have been relatively flawless.  She in a phase now where bouncing on our laps, playing with ice cubes on the tray table, and taking occasional milk induced naps can keep her occupied for hours.  This system has it’s weaknesses, since she is on our laps the whole time our own endurance is required to keep her bouncing, playing with ice or sleeping .  Also, it really helps if she’s had a good night’s sleep and the flight is in the morning.

Trade show travel is not light, three rolling suitcases, two carry-ons, a diaper bag, a car seat, a stroller, and a baby in the chest carrier.

Allow me to back up for a moment, two and a half weeks ago, back on the 12th of January, Sage, Lisa and I left Portland for our first tradeshow as a family.  We skidded on the icy streets to the Portland airport, only to land in Atlanta which was covered in even slipperier ice.  Seriously, I think I saw a Zamboni driving down the street.  We met my mom at the Atlanta airport, and together made our way downtown by train.  We didn’t pack light, and our short walk from the train station to the hotel resembled a Charlie Chaplin film in a banana factory, except nobody fell down and we weren’t accompanied by ragtime piano.  Sage traveled really well the whole time, and the time difference didn’t seem to affect her very much.  We were in Atlanta for a week, the show was a success, and Sage had a chance to hang out with her Grandma Marianne, who adored her like only a grandma can.  It is a wonderful thing to watch my mom play with Sage, talking to her and showing her off to her trade show friends.  We also spent some time with an old Solmate Sock employee and friend Lisa and Bennitt Weinstein and their beautiful daughter Eleanor.  Atlanta is a wonderful city to walk around in, especially when led on an urban hike by locals after the ice melts.

A Booth-Baby in her natural habitat.

Next we flew from chilly Atlanta to sunny LA, with 70 degree weather and the kind of rush hour traffic that makes you not care that the weather is so beautiful.  We stayed with Lisa’s parents in Simi Valley, and the cross-country trip from door to door took 11 hours.  Ironically, the flight across the country lasted five hours, which is almost how long it took to deboard the plane in LA, get our luggage, rent a car, and get to Simi Valley in rush hour traffic.  By the end of it Sage was a getting impatient, but as soon as she was in her other Grandmother’s arms, all was right with the world.  We stayed in LA for a little less than a week, driving to the convention center downtown, which was either 45 minutes or 2 hours away depending on the traffic-gods (who are spiteful), and had a decent show.

Sage in the LA booth with Lisa, Grandma Jojo and Grandpa Toto

Lisa’s mom, Mary Jo had a blast with Sage, lauding after her and speaking to her in Spanish (she is a Spanish teacher).  It’s so great to hand Sage over to Grandma Jojo, as she prefers to be called, and watch them wind each other up in a feedback loop of smiles and babbling.  Grandpa Tom, or Grandpa Toto also featured a neat toy called a mustache on his face, which Sage seemed to think was perfect for pull-ups. Grandma Jojo had a little red throne ready for Sage, although the family dog seemed to think it was for her.

Coco likes the new mini-throne.

After we finished the LA show, we flew up to Portland.  Being home was great, but we were only scheduled to be there for 36 hours, doing laundry and re-packing for the next show, and the weather-gods had different plans (also spiteful).
New York was our next destination, but it got hammered by snow the day we were leaving.  Our ideal flight at 8 in the morning was canceled.  Ideally, it was going to be a direct flight from Portland to Newark, it was going to leave at the perfect time for optimal Sage endurance, and it was going to get us into New York in time to set up the show.  The next best flight was the worst option, a red-eye flight to Houston with a transfer to LaGuardia.  The midnight flight was delayed for three hours, and we boarded a plane at 3am already exhausted with a baby that couldn’t believe we were actually getting back onto another plane.  The first flight she did alright, but holding a half-sleeping child on a narrow seat while trying to sleep oneself is a tiresome task.   About midway through the second flight Sage decided that enough was enough, no amount of milk could get her to nap, no amount of distraction could stop her from squirming, and she wound herself up like, well, a wind up toy that then starts to fart and cry.
She squirmed like an interpretive dancer, expanding with an arched back and then contracting her forehead towards her toes, it was all I could do to keep her from slamming her body parts into the seat in front of us.  Lisa and I passed her back and forth, trying our various tricks, but she was tired and bored, and we were two exhausted parents who were out of energy to keep her calm.  Finally, her moans of displeasure turned to full on crying.  Normally I would be embarrassed to put the neighboring passengers through this, but one advantage of complete exhaustion is that you loose all sympathy for other peoples discomfort and only focus on your own; at least they didn’t have to spot an infant doing some god-awful contact improv on their laps.  Finally, the exhaustion got the best of her, and through tearful moans we were able to get her to drink a bottle and go to sleep for the last hour of the flight.  14 hours after we left our house in Portland, we arrived at the New York hotel room, took our pants off and indulged in room service.
Right before bed we bathed Sage, and I accidentally let more water get on her face than she was used to.  She must have inhaled water through her nose, because she started to cry, then scream, then wads of watery snot dribbled from her nose.  Her attempts to inhale through her nose sounded like gargling snorts.  We tried to give her a pacifier, but it forced her to breathe in through her nose, which she didn’t like. Drinking milk had the same problem.  I knew that if she would just blow air out her nose she would be fine, but no amount of back patting, different body positions, or comforting would calm her down.  Much like Spinal Tap, our daughter can sometimes get noisy, but this was the first time she ever went up to 11.  She was livid, bright red, and if she had control of language, she would have been swearing and screaming “I wanna go home”.  After 15 minutes Lisa and I were out of ideas.  I don’t remember who started jumping around like a court jester, but somehow parents doing jackass clowning antics confused her enough to make her calm down.  She settled, fell asleep, and we soon followed suit.

I never like seeing Sage get upset like that, I never want her to be unhappy, and as a parent it is my job to help her be content as much as possible.  We’ve learned some good techniques on these trips to foresee problems before they arise, and deal with problems as they occur with various objects and antics.  We really are getting better at this as we go along, and in the end we feel like we will have a more flexible, socialized child than if we were to not travel at all.  It’s a learning process, and we aren’t experts yet, I mean she doesn’t even crawl yet, and mobility will be a real game changer, but we’ll figure it out.

Sage back on top.

After a couple good nights sleep Sage seems to have returned to her smiling self.  As any supermodel might do, she tries to eat paper and looses control of her bowels, but she is also a professional and knows when to turn on the smiles and strut her stuff.  My Mom is also at this show, and will be at the next one in two weeks in Philadelphia, so there is more grandma time to be had and four more flights before winter trade show season will be over.  Sage has been a trooper, and as long as we can avoid another perfect storm of red-eye flights, I think we’ll make it.  Anyway, all this is cross-training for our trip to Ireland later on this spring, now if we could only figure out how to pack lighter.

Of course, there are some pessimists at the trade shows who say that in a year, Sage will be upright, and it would be a nightmare to take a waddling toddler to trade shows.  I shrug my shoulders, but in my mind I think “Sage won’t be waddling, she’s a supermodel, she’ll be strutting”.

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