A Report on My Trip to Seattle

It felt good to be flying alone, wearing a suit, running a meeting, drinking a martini, eating fancy food and sleeping in a king size bed (alone). It seemed a little weird just how natural it felt being sans baby. And then I remembered that I had about 28 years of life before he was born, so of course it felt normal. But I still woke up on Carter's schedule - every 2-4 hours at night. It certainly helped knowing that Carter was well taken care of by Thomas and my dad. I got back from Seattle very late Tuesday night and was glad to get back to my house-o-men.

Here are a few things I learned on my trip:

• If you just think about it hard enough, a refrigerator will appear in your hotel room. Like magic.
• Regardless, hotels are happy to cool things for you. In fact, they have claim checks specifically for this purpose - the claim checks even have check boxes to indicate whether your item is in the refrigerator or freezer.
• It doesn't matter if they are women, or if their bathrooms have signs advertising a Mom's Room. It is too weird to ask your client if there is a room where you can lactate.
• It is counter-productive to manually pump your breasts in a tiny airplane lavatory while experiencing mild turbulence.
• If you don't really get to know your breast pump bag, you will mistakenly believe that you've lost your battery power source, resulting in said manual pumping and making a tough situation even more stressful. Not to mention encouraging your husband to make fun of you when you find your "lost" power was with you all along.