Mama On The Go - Not a Happy Ending

I had to go out of town for work earlier in the week.  It was much harder on me to be away from the boy this time around than the last one, but that's probably got mostly to do with the business vs. pleasure factor!

John expressed the desire to keep Mitchell by himself while I was gone to my conference, and after much preparation on my part, I flew off to Chicago for a few days of adult interaction, cocktail parties, sleep, and no laundry/washing/cooking/cleaning.  It was sort of heavenly, except for the work part.  The one glitch while I was there came when I couldn't check into my room until about 5:00 p.m. (no clean rooms until then) and had to lock myself in a public bathroom to pump.  Standing up.  Oy.

John had a much rougher time - Mitchell ended up running a fever at school on Monday, which meant he had to be picked up and held out of school for at least Tuesday, or until his fever broke.  The pediatrician diagnosed another ear infection and prescribed another round of antibiotics (we weren't even done with the previous round and I think that puts the count up to 5 now, so clearly we've got an ENT visit in our future, but I'll leave that for another post).  John handled it all like a champ and his mom was so sweet to come down and watch Mitchell on Tuesday so that John could get some work done.  He did a fabulous job and while he has always appreciated what I do as a mother, I think this time alone with the babe has given him a newfound respect for all the days and nights I fly solo when he's working.  I was really proud of him, and I think he and Mitchell had some great bonding time too.

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Fast forward to when it was time for us to board our flight to return, and to make a long story short, we missed our flight due to gate change issues and by the time we found out about it, our seats had been given away.  Let me just insert here that we'd been checked in for over 2 hours and at the gate that was printed on our boarding passes for over an hour.  However, sometime during that period the gate changed, and the ONLY annoucement that was made at our "original" gate was to annouce that it was final boarding call at the other gate, and by the time we got there we were not allowed on the flight.  My boss and I both had words with the gate agent, but after much wrangling it was apparent to us that we weren't getting to Chattanoga by plane that evening.

We flew into an airport about 2 hours away and rented a car to come home.  Once we got to the airport, I went in to return the rental car and collect my bags, only to find the airline counter all locked up for the night (the perils of living in a city with only a teeny tiny airport).

**Warning:  This section of the post may not be for everyone's taste.**
  It would have been no big deal, except for the roughly 60 ounces of breastmilk that I had stored safely in my bag.  I had done extensive research on whether to check or to carry on, and after much deliberation on my part, I decided to check.  I had a fridge in my hotel room, so I kept all my milk in the fridge until the very last minute, and then wrapped it very well and then packed a cooler with gel packs and put it in my suitcase, along with my pump.  All told, had everything gone as planned, the milk would have been out of the fridge for no longer than 6 hours and it was going to be chilled that entire time.

I should have known not to expect for everything to go smoothly.  As it was, I had to retrive my bag the next day and throw all of that milk that I'd worked so hard to keep away.  But not before taking a picture.  I know, I know...stupid to torture myself in that way, but I just couldn't help myself:

And to add insult to injury, my boy was already alseep when I got home.  Needless to say, I was really eager for him to wake up the next morning.  Someone remind me not to go anywhere again for a while!