And That's How You Endear Yourself to Hotel Staff

first vacation with the baby. like, real vacation where we're staying in a hotel among strangers instead of with family. who have to love us.

it requires a lot of packing. and planning. and apologizing.

we're in the home town of all of our parents, but we're staying downtown in a fancy shmancy hotel (courtesy of my parents- thank you very much!) so we can enjoy the art competition going on in the city and so that we can celebrate our anniversary (oct 5, next weds, 9 yrs).

so last night on our way into town, our usual 2 hour trip took 4 hrs. there was tons of traffic and it was rainy and henrymonkeymonster required several stops for feeding and voiding. we (FINALLY) got to my in-laws hours late to drop the dog and have a visit and they fed us an amazing vegan meal (from the thrive diet and alicia silverstone's new cookbook) and so we didn't get to the hotel until after 11.

when we arrived we valet'd the car (see? we are VERY fancy) and had a bellhop help us with all of our bags. the count on our bags is something like 36. for only 4 months old, kid has a lot of baggage. (har har har)

we got up to our room around midnight and got settled in. exhausted (up since 5am, worked all day), we just wanted to go to sleep but i happened to notice that the cooler bag with all of our bottles full of breast milk was missing. now why would this matter, since i'm nursing anyway, you ask?

BECAUSE I WANTED TO DRINK. we have a babysitter (my mum) saturday night and I WANTED TO DRINK on our hot date. we went out to a fancy romantical dinner to celebrate our anniversary and I WANTED TO DRINK. and if i had no pre-pumped reserve milk, i would have to be running back and forth to the hotel to nurse him and...

we scoured our room and...nothing. so we called the front desk to see if we'd left it somewhere down there while checking in. no, haven't seen it, we'll have the valet folks pull the car around. now, mind you, we had been there less than an hour and had already had them pull the car around one to retrieve my cell phone, so now we are TRULY, 'those people.'

and the car comes up with nothing. the front desk manager is calling us every 10 minutes to report progress. offering to buy us formula, etc. robb goes down to the lobby and searches around. the manager calls the bellhop and his manager. at one point they thought maybe it had gotten mixed up and dropped off in another room (i'm envisioning strangers making caucasians with my breast milk). but it hadn't.

so then they looked at the security footage. it hadn't fallen off or been stolen by another hungry baby or anything. we were all perplexed.

then the manager called back and asked just how big the bag was. small! smaller than a loaf of bread. but way more important!

well, ma'am, we see in the footage someone putting a small bag in the bottom of the stroller...could it be there?

shit.

yes, it could be there. it could be in the mesh pocket in the stroller, folded up leaning against the wall, sitting 3 feet from me this whole time.

d'oh! so we made a bunch of people jump through a bunch of hoops for our own stupidity.

but the story ends well with us enjoying a wonderful dinner (and a glass of cabernet AND a martini!!) and henry enjoying great time with his grandma, having his own caucasian. hold the kahlua. hold the vodka. hold the ice.