Today, I had a meeting for a volunteer project my boss recruited me for. A meeting in NoHo to which I could not bring a baby. It was OK to take him into the office on Tuesday for the preliminary meeting to this meeting. Not so much today. And I knew I needed to be AT this meeting. I was being brought in to share my expertise on Emerging & Social Media, and it’s hard to be involved in a conversation enough to impart knowledge when you are on a conference call & can’t see everyone.
This could potentially pose an issue. After all, what do you DO with a seven week old infant when you have no relatives available to watch him? You have to track down a babysitter. And I didn’t want Ben going to a stranger that I would have to screen & deal with. Fortunately, I remembered a comment on my journal from Annika, saying she would take the baby sometime during the day. And, thankfully, she (a) meant it and (b) was available. I had someone to watch Ben whom I knew – and who had a baby boy of her own. And it was a HUGE RELIEF. Especially since Annika, and her husband Will, are awesome people with a great deal of enthusiasm for borrowing my little piglet.
And everything went great. I dropped off Ben, with his supplies, including a couple of meals worth of pumped milk. He was well behaved – not fussy, napping, etc – while visiting. And when I got back, Annika greeted me with him napping on her shoulder. Paul calls Ben the shoulder limpet because he LOVES napping draped on someone’s shoulder. My baby is good at making himself right at home with other people who are not his parents. And this is good, because the poor little guy has to go to daycare soon, and he’ll have to adjust to new people there, too.
Oh, and in retrospect, I should have had Annika’s Twittr stream sent to my BlackBerry. Then I would have known how the babysitting was going during my meeting.
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