Mama Travel Tips

Whether you’re traveling solo or with the little ones in tow, I’ve got summer travel tips for miles and miles of breastfeeding and pumping!  If only you could earn skymiles that way…

Solo

So you’re on a solo trip and you’re pumping.  How to keep your sanity?

• Find places that have pumping stations.  Just the other day, I was at the DC Amtrak station and they had a special booth for private breastfeeding or pumping.  Look these places up ahead of your trip if you know where you’re going to be eventually, and see if you can map out a comfortable pumping schedule for yourself that meets your travel needs.  Of course, I say this like that is so very easy to do. It might end up being kind of a trek through your own personal hellscape, but you know — it’s worth a try.
• Along those same lines, don’t forget that places like Nordstrom have excellent women’s lounges.  If pumping by yourself in a car when it’s a zillion degrees outside isn’t your thing, this may be a better option than pulling over at a Panera (even if the bagels are appropriately boob-shaped to fit the theme of that type of visit).
• Maybe this is your first trip after weaning and there won’t be any pumping at all!  Exciting stuff. I order you — command! — to treat yourself to the beverage of your choice, and enjoy said beverage.  You did it!

Out with the Tots

So you’re on a trip with the littles.  How grand! Here are some tips I learned when I had the joy of vacation traveling while breastfeeding and pumping.

• Sometimes dudes will look at you funny if you breastfeed openly at a brewery, and that is not your problem.  You enjoy your vacation trip, and if that trip includes a brewery, you are allowed to be there. Having an infant does not mean you are not allowed in, like it’s some weird boys-and-non-lactating-people-only club.  Take up the space that’s just as much yours as theirs, gosh darn it.
• Fitting rooms at Target make excellent “lounge” areas for breastfeeding, if public feeding isn’t your thing, but you don’t want to stay in the stuffy car another minute after all those hours on the road, you don’t want to use the bathroom (blorf), and it’s too hot outside to LIVE (amirite) and you also need to buy more road trip snax.  I’d just go in with like, four shirts, take a long time, then come back out with them and put them on the put-away rack, and keep on keepin’ on.
• If anybody gives you the evil eye about popping a boob in a crying baby’s mouth on a flight, you give them a zillion evil eyes right back.  Enlist everyone on the plane to help you. This person deserves total and complete shunning.
• Speaking of babies on planes, I highly recommend dressing your baby in the absolute cutest outfit you own for them on their flight.  I’m not one for making little gift-bags for passengers as some sort of apology for having a baby, because babies exist (that’s…kind of how we all got here) and are in fact allowed on public transportation and in the public eye in general.  But dressing a baby as cutely as possible, I’ve found, does much the same thing: it’s like a wee inoculation against evil eyes. I mean, it’s pretty hard to evil-eye a baby who’s dressed as like, a rubber ducky. How could you. I mean come on.  So go crazy. Heck, bring out the Halloween lobster costume if you must. Whatever you have to put that baby in that’ll get the old grannies cooing, that’s the outfit you go with. Which is how my daughter ended up on a plane in shoes that looked like little clouds and rainbow tights and pigtails.  You do what you gotta do. Me? I was in, like, pajama pants and a raggy sweatshirt. Because travel.

Happy travels!