Homes Sweet Former Homes

Last week, my work took me to NYC and Chicago. It was so nice to visit my former home cities. There are things that I just love so much about both places, and at the top of the list is the people I know that still live there! In NYC, I got to have dinner with my friend Paul (Joo was out of town - boo!), and in Chicago, I got to have dinner with the Stubblefields and breakfast with the Martens. It was such a treat!

The bottom view is from the window of my hotel room at the Four Seasons in Chicago. Now that I work for Boys & Girls Clubs of America, I don't usually stay at places like the Four Seasons, so it was a real treat (due to the meeting I was there for taking place at the hotel). Now, I learned something very interesting on this trip. This go around with breastfeeding, I have found it much more difficult to travel and pump milk than it was five years ago. This is largely due to the fact that hotels used to be very accommodating with refrigerating things for me and freezing my ice packs, but I have had the hardest time getting hotels to do that now. Several hotels have cited something about health department restrictions on refrigerating things for guests, so I thought perhaps that there may be some new policies at play. But that theory was disproved when I asked at the Four Seasons and they were only too happy to take care of my milk and ice packs. This lead to the realization that the difference is most likely due to the very different quality of hotel that I was staying in five years ago when I worked in the corporate world versus now...