Mommy's Day Out

Yesterday I had a much needed day away.  Many of the ladies in my crazy family decided to get away for a girls' weekend in NYC.  Not wanting to take Evelyn to the big city, and not being able to go a whole weekend away from her, I decided to go for just the day.  This day couldn't have come at a better time.  I've been going a little stir crazy for the past week or so, and Steve was practically pushing me out the door yesterday morning because he knew how important a day away was for my sanity.

Last week I mentioned how we went on a little road trip and I spent the evening before gathering everything I thought we would need.  Apparently going away for the day without Evelyn even requires that I spend the evening before gathering a ton of stuff because when I said I couldn't go a whole weekend away, I meant that I physically can't go a whole weekend away from her.  When you're a breastfeeding mom, a whole day away is absolutely impossible, unless you want to walk around Manhattan in a soaked shirt, leaving a trail of milk behind.  So, I got all my pump supplies together, including 4 bottles, lids (I learned that one the hard way), the pump, pump attachments, the cooler bag, and packed it all in my bookbag, along with my hooter hider (genius!).  I even remembered a burp cloth.

I had no plan for how I was going to make the pumping happen, but I prevented the need to immediately pump by feeding Evelyn at 5 am and then pumping right before we left.  After that, I just figured I would make it work as I needed, trying to keep in mind that my body is used to her eating every 3 hours throughout the day.  After a stop in Hoboken on the way, we got to Manhattan around 11:00 and my mom, aunt, and I drove to the hotel they were going to be staying.  Getting ourselves situated in the parking garage, I figured it had been a sufficient amount of time and it was a good time to do a pumping session.  So there I sat, in the backseat of the car in a parking garage hooked up to the machine.  Easy.

We had a great day - grabbed lunch, visited Mood, took the Staten Island ferry, visited the 9/11 Memorial, and walked around Times Square.  At about 5:00, we were sitting down to some pizza when I suddenly got a physical reminder that it had been about 6 hours since I last emptied out.  While the parking garage was a weird place to pump, the middle of a pizza joint in lower Manhattan was just a little more public, but with a nice big family, it was surprisingly easy.  I got under the hooter hider, hooked up sitting right there at the table, a few family members placed themselves strategically around me, and I sat there eating my pizza and emptied out.  I really wish I had taken a picture.