What I learned this weekend

• If you’re thinking about flying with a two-year-old and a four-month-old, DON’T DO IT.  Or at least bring a nanny.  Everything went pretty well for us. There was very little crying on the plane and no disasters.  Honestly, things couldn’t have gone much better.  But it was so unbelievably exhausting I fear I may never recover.  I don’t know how I would have survived it if things had gone wrong.
• When you squish a baby tightly into a Moby wrap, there’s really no place for poop to go except out of the diaper.  Consider not wearing a white shirt.
• You can have an amazing time with 50 people you’ve never met.
• If you insist on taking a breastfeeding baby on a plane trip, throw any hopes of modesty out the window.  Over the course of the trip I flashed a (female) TSA agent, a young (male) professional traveling alone, a not-at-all-subtle man who stared intently as my child ate*, and everyone seated near me on the plane.  Multiple times. 
• Speaking of nursing, you want to know how I knew the Blathering ladies where “my people” (a phrase used often this past weekend)? There was a semi-designated pumping area at the Blathering house and a small shelf full of breastmilk in the fridge.
• The outside dining area at the flagship Whole Foods is cutthroat.  On Sunday I walked out of the store carrying a bunch of food, with a baby strapped to me, and trying to herd a two-year-old.  As I was almost to a table, a woman on a bike flew past me and practically threw herself on the table to claim it before I could.  There were no other open tables.  I stood there for a few minutes.  Some people got up to leave.  When I was almost to that table, the same woman ran in front of me and grabbed the only chair, so she could have FOUR at her table.
• Don’t feed the birds means:  for the love of God, don’t feed the birds.  Enough people evidently ignore the signs the pigeons consider any food in the patio area fair game.  I was sitting on the edge of the rock wall (because I had NO CHAIR), eating a piece of sushi, and a pigeon came flying at me and TOOK A BITE OF MY FOOD.  While it was on the way to my mouth.  The damn bird almost hit me in the face.  I screamed, threw the rest of the piece, and two other birds immediately converged and devoured it.  I ate the rest of the sushi hunched over the table trying to hide it from the pigeons and flinching every time I saw one.**
• You can have it all – at least for the weekend.  I had a fun family weekend.  I had a girls’ weekend.  I had some down time.  I even read a whole book.  Going into the weekend I was panicking, thinking there was no way bringing my family to the Blathering would work.  But it did.  And I loved it.  My only regret is I didn’t get to hear more mother-in-law stories from TJ.

* Interestingly, the staring man wasn’t leering in an “omg, BOOBZ” kind of way, he seemed perplexed as to what I was doing.  It’s like I was feeding the baby via my elbow or something – he looked like he had no idea what was going on.
** I now totally get why Phoebe Buffay threw the bowl full of lottery tickets when the scary pigeon flew at her.  I think this was the SAME PIGEON.  He’s probably bitter he didn’t grab that $10,000 ticket.