I am traveling for work yet again. This trip has me away from home for five nights. If I didn’t enjoy what I do so much I think it would drive me crazy, because even though I do like what I do I don’t like being away from my family. It helps that my DH doesn’t complain about me being away, and having to step-up and take care of the kids solo. What doesn’t help is the fact that my Mom came to visit last week, and she is still at my house until Wednesday. When she was contemplating a trip I told her to just buy the tickets and I would work around her dates, unfortunately a new project kicked off and I was asked to be on it. I had been very low on work for most of the summer, so I was definitely due for a new project. I just wish I didn’t have to leave during her once a year visit. Thankfully DH took a few days off of work so my Mom could spend a few more days with the kids (the real reason for the visit).
Tonight I am just hanging out in my hotel room, watching some television and surfing the internet at the same time. I picked up a burrito at a fast food place, and then got some milk, a two liter of Diet Root Beer, and some animal crackers to round out my evening. I am really living the high life now. Business travel is not exactly exotic. I spend each night thinking about how many more nights I need to pass before I get to leave. Certainly there are some perks to being kid-free for a few nights, like having time to post here for one. I would trade the perks for being able to give my kids kisses good night in person every time though. Oh well, at this point whining isn’t helping my mood or the situation, so I should stop wallowing. Perhaps I should find something more productive to occupy my “free-time” with. Maybe I could start scrapbooking, but then I would have to haul all of that stuff with me, and I’m guessing I wouldn’t enjoy that. Maybe I could load all of my digital photos onto my laptop hard drive so I could categorize them and apply labels so it will be easy to find pictures of The Girl when she was 2 months old on a whim, or pictures of The Boy and The Girl together last Halloween. Granted we do have the pictures sorted by date already, but the finer categories seems like a good idea, maybe I could even order prints from our digital photos for the first time since The Boy was over one year old (yes we are bad parents, with absolutely no printed snapshots of our youngest child). Yes, I will definitely do that, of course it needs to wait until my next trip. Someone needs to hold me to that.
DH is getting ready to make a trip to the Far East next month. I guess I will have a new perspective for what it is like to be alone with our kids for an entire week. I don’t think I will get the same level of sympathy everyone I meet while I travel seems to confer to my DH though. For some reason it is a huge enigma to others that a man can handle tending for his children for a week. When clients find out I have children, they inevitably ask “what do you do with your kids when you are away?” I typically mention that my DH takes care of them, and try to change the subject. It seems like a very odd question to ask someone. It is as if they assume I must have a full time nanny in order to be able to travel. I don’t think anyone would ask a male consultant what he does with his kids while he travels, they would just assume that his wife takes care of things while he is away. Why do they ask me? It just seems weird. Yes, I am the only female consultant in my very small company, but I am not the only woman with kids who has to travel for work. I suppose the super-woman would want to keep traveling to prove something to the rest of the world, but really I don’t want to be that woman. I want to be a good Mom, and I hope that by traveling when I need to, I am not damaging my children in some way. I don’t think that I am. Anyway, it is one down and four more to go until I can go home and squeeze my kids tight again.
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