Working mom

Like any new job or specialty motherhood has its terms of art, intelligible and even counterintuitive, to the uninitiated. The phrase of the week is “sleeps through the night”. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Hey so here I am proud to announce that Evie now “sleeps through the night” hooray! Right? Well not quite. Sleeping through the night in mommyhood speak equals six hours or more. Six hours? What normal human considers that sleeping through the night? OK so the problem here is interpreting sleeps through the night to mean a good night’s sleep. Ahh the trickiness of language ☺ Well so now Genevieve is sleeping six hours at a time and it is definitely at night. Actually I consider myself lucky. She chooses to do her six hours from 9:30ish to 4 am ish. I met with some friends from my pregnancy class this weekend and some of their babies choose to do their sleeping through the night starting at 7pm. (Which at this time of the year it isn’t even dark then so it is a super misnomer then now isn’t it?)

So it is a good thing that Miss Evie is giving me 6 hours at a stretch these days because working two jobs (mommyhood and at ADWR) would be next to impossible otherwise. I had a bit of a rough week because a pending deadline dictated that I needed to work pretty close to 40 hours this week which was much harder (mentally not physically) than I thought it would be. I think really it was the stress combined with the hours that did me in… well that and the first embarrassing, mildly degrading pump on the go experience.

I was at a conference helping out with the AV side things so it was impossible to just slip out and in as needed. It was at this fancy hotel but I didn’t have time (and honestly was just a little bit too embarrassed) to ask for a special room to pump in. So I escaped to a bathroom that fortunately had very few people in it and whipped out my contraption. I squatted on the floor (wearing a suit I wasn’t about to sit) and proceeded to take care of business. I felt like that darn pump was as loud as a jet engine and everyone coming and going must have been curious as to what that bizarre noise from the last stall was. Well that was OK, but then 3 hours later when we had another break everyone, of course, made a b-line to the bathroom. At this point there was no way I was going to hold up a line at the bathroom so I could squat and pump for 10 minutes so I decided (foolishly) that I would just wait until I went home. Ouch what a mistake that was! Ahh the adventures of the working mom….