In honour of Bring your kid to work day (Yesterday! April 26th 2012) I thought I’d share my experience last week. Yes I’m on maternity leave and no I haven’t done the obligatory take your new baby to office trip. The reason? Simple.. not everyone is baby friendly. There’s quite a few people who at my workplace would prefer to not deal with kids that are not their own. Fair enough I say. I never did enjoy working in a cubicle being on a conferance call only to have a baby wailing in the background. I love babies. Seriously. I have one right? Okay truth be told.. now that I have my own… I’d much rather not play with stranger babies. My friends’ and family’s babies..YES PLEASE! With an EXTRA dollop of drool even! Others..aeh not so much. If I don’t know you..I won’t walk up to you and tell you how cute your baby is and ask to play with them.
Being on maternity leave has enabled me to connect with many social media mavens, many of them are work from home moms (and a few dads) and I’d love to be part of that community someday. Though my reality is that I will soon return to work. Which got me thinking about family friendly companies and how I’ve heard of parents taking babies to conferances and meetings. I have even heard of a lawyer in Toronto who takes her baby to work with her every day! Impressive eh! I have a quiet one on my hand.. I should be able to do that right? Do I want to? That’s another story. I think going to work and having a bit of a separation will be healthy for both of us. Hopefully there’s a daycare solution very very close by when the time comes.
As a test run I attended a marketing conference and workshop…and a legit one at that too, they had executives from the likes of Facebook and Google. I had reached out to the president of the conference and she also being a new mom welcomed me and even said that there would be a quiet room should I need to nurse or let the baby crawl around. Great this sounded like just the place to take the little one to! The hubs and I are both marketeers and found the topics and speakers on feature to be quite the lineup so off we went. I found a seat fairly close to the exit (incase of any piercing screams) and got comfy. No sooner had I locked the pram (out of anyone’s way) when someone came by to inform me (with a smile) that I was to take the baby out at the slightest sound and that they weren’t as baby friendly as some other companies. EEKS! Now that totally put a damper on everything. While I kept a watchful eye on the Little Monkey and also listened (and took notes) it was definitely a very tense feeling for me. I did not mean to offend anyone, besides I had received written permission from the president. I should be okay right? Everyone else was extremely kind, commented on how well behaved she was and how adorable she looked. Many even volunteered to look after her if I wanted to pay closer attention to the speakers. Needless to say, at the slighted look of figittyness I quickly got up, and took her closer to the exit. She barely made a sound during our time there but at the first break (about 2.5 hours into the 4 hour conference) we decided to leave.
In hindsight, I really should not have allowed ONE person to affect me the way it did. So was my experiment a fail? Probably. Though I did learn a few things. Yes I can easily manage a conference with a baby. That said, my undivided attention was not given, though in all honesty I’d have been on Twitter or doing a few doodles if the baby wasn’t there. Was the baby a distraction? Probably. But no more than if there was a hot model look alike attending the conference. You know who I’m talking about. I’ll definitely attend another ‘baby friendly’ conference with the Little Monkey given the chance and next time, I’ll be better prepared to talk DOWN any naysayers.
Anyone with any baby at conference experiences to share?
