Working Mom

I have been a mom for a year now and working for 6 months of it. One day my colleague told me 'Oh we would love to see a lot more of you in office'. My son had been sick for more than a week and I was working from home. That comment made me realise that career and motherhood don't go well together: especially in the first few years of motherhood. Well to make things clear, I never had a very high-flying career before my son was born, but I was quite ambitious, worked hard, stayed late to complete projects and generally gave 100% into my work. The general opinion was that I did a good job. But things changed quite drastically once I became a mom. My priorities had to shift (quite naturally). I now had someone who depended on me for everything. Balancing work and motherhood is quite tough. I do feel the tussle between professional ambition and motherhood from time to time. How do you kill that feeling of guilt that comes seeping through when you hear your child cry as you leave for work ? Or that sadness that envelopes you when he doesn't seem to mind when you go. How do you concentrate on that all important meeting when you know you child is down with a cold and fever and is refusing to eat whole day ? How can you explain to your colleagues that you are going home at 5:30 cos you came to office long before they arrived and that you need to be with your baby after being away for almost 12 hours ? How can you tell all this to your colleagues all of whom are men ? Most are fathers but somehow they don't seem been wrecked by these thoughts, but then all of them had wives who opted to stay at home to look after their babies. So I have to ignore comments regarding my work ethics and just continue doing my job.
Having a working mom in a company may seem like a bad idea to many, but I think there are many skills that we moms have to offer
Patience : How else can you handle an hyper-active toddler who refuses to do anything you say. These skills will definitely help you tackle any wayward colleague
Time management and Multitasking: Try looking after the house and managing a baby for couple of weeks, you will know the value of these skills.
Innovation and Problem solving skills : Need to think of a 100 different ways to entertain a fussy toddler while he eats his dinner. or think up a different story each night to put him to sleep. What product/creative company would not love to have a person with such imagination ?
So anyone looking for an ambitious, hard-working, talented working mom: you know whom to call ;)

Paris Revisited

September 2007. We decided to revisit the magic of Paris once again, but this time with extended family. I had very fond memories of our last trip to Paris and was hence quite dewy eyed thinking of this trip. I was looking forward to seeing all the romantic sights of Paris.

Pre-trip preparations

Travelling with a toddler is always stressful , atleast for me. I am always asking qts like 'Have i taken enough clothes ?' 'Does he have enough food?' 'Should I take more diapers' ... By the end of my packing I think I had enough food to feed an army and enough diapers to sell in a market !!! Its also funny how travelling with a toddler changes your perspective of the attractions. My only criteria for an attraction was availability of baby changing facility and stroller accessibility !

To and Fro

I would recommend taking the Eurostar if travelling with kids. They have more freedom to run around and enjoy. I cannot speak for our fellow passengers though :D. Return trip was a bit of a nightmare since my son refused to sleep and we had to move away from our assigned seats and go to the area between 2 carraiges to entertain him. Next time I am going to pack more toys for my son !!

Now Paris is a city for the fit and healthy. It can get quite tiring for those who cannot walk long distances , as we soon found out.

Metro

Almost none of the stations in Paris have an escalator, so we spent most of our trip lugging the stroller up and down the numerous stairs. My in-laws were also quite tired walking up and down the stairs. Also, the exits at most stations were not very stroller friendly. There were couple of places where the exit door nearly slammed into the stroller !!! The interchanges between lines is also quite a long walk, but we found that it was much easier to transit between RERs. So we took the RER whenever possible.

People

What Paris lacks in facilities, it makes up with people. We were prepared for a cold reception to our toddler in most places, but to our amazement we found Parisians we quite baby friendly. One of the stations I was lugging the stroller on my own when 2 teenagers came upto me and carried the stroller all the way up. I have never experienced such good manners in teenagers in London !! Also, my son loves to look at people and talk to them and the surprising thing was most of the people responded back. Funniest moment was when a tough looking punk climbed in the train , our son babbled to him and the punk smiled and did a little dance for him !!

Eating

We had 2 issues when searching for a place to eat. 1. We needed a place that would accept babies and 2. We needed something that served vegeterian food. I had printed out a big list of places based on our iterinary, but since we didnt stick to the plan we did have to scourge for places. We found a Korean restaurant near Notre Dame (other side of the river). The food was fantatsic. They didn't have a high chair for our son, but they didnt mind letting him sit with us.

We had dinner at Pooja restauarant in Passage Brady. Passage Brady is full of so called Indian restaurants, but Pooja was the only authentic Indian restaurant. Food was good and we sat outside so our son enoyed watching the rush of people. The last restaurant we visited was an Iranian restaurant on a street off Champs Elysees. The food was yummy and service was good too.

Attractions

I did have a plan of what we could do each day. Given that we were travelling with a toddler and quite elderly in-laws, we knew that we would not be able to see all the attractions. We managed to cover Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Arc De Triomphe, Champs Elysees and Montmarte. We did Eiffel Tower at mid-morning when it was a little less crowded, but there was still a long queue for the tickets. I wish there were advance tickets like they have for the London Eye and other London attractions. I did have high hopes of doing some shopping, but luckily for my husband we ran out of time.

The trip was nice but quite tiring and unlike my last paris trip I was looking forward to coming home.