Road Trip with a Breastfeeding Baby

Some mothers may think that taking a road trip with a breastfeeding baby will be something that is easy to do. After all there are no bottles to sterilize and mother's milk never needs to be warmed up. I was one of these mothers and I can attest to the fact that it not as easy as it seems.

When my son was five months old my husband was called to take a test for a postal position in Pennslyvania. We lived in Western New York and the test site was about eight hours away. I had been cooped up in the house for the most part since my son was born and was getting a little stir crazy. I decided it would be a good idea for the baby and I to go to Pa. with my husband as a mini-vacation of sorts. I love hotel rooms and always have so we made a reservation at a Holiday Inn. We packed plenty of diapers and clothes as well as our son's pack-and-play to sleep in. We loaded up the car and were off. We didn't anticipate there being any problems.

Getting to our destination was not that difficult. We left a day early, drove for three hours and then stopped at my husband's aunts house for a visit since she lived half way to where we needed to be. We spent the night there and planned to attend church the next day. We had a nice dinner and tried to go to sleep, but the baby was having nothing of it. My husband had the morning drive so I let him rest and I took care of the little man. My husband offered to let me stay behind the next morning and sleep while he took our son to mass but I was stubborn and decided to go. Between being up all night, being a little dehydrated from not drinking enough during the drive the previous day, and having my reserves tapped from a hungry breastfeeding baby I was not in the best of shape. I ended up passing out briefly at the end of the service and was humiliated. Luckily I was not holding the baby when it happened,

Because we had to get to our hotel we could not afford for me to rest before we started driving again. We did pack lots of water this time and I sipped and slept the next five hour drive to the hotel. I made sure to feed the baby right before we left so he slept as well.

We enjoyed that evening in a nice hotel room and the next day my husband took his test. When he returned we loaded the car back up and planned to drive straight through the next eight hours. This was when the real trouble started. We wanted to make good time so we avoided stopping at service areas unless we had too. This was okay for a few hours. Then the baby started to get hungry and there was no place to stop in sight. After driving for twenty minutes with a wailing hungry baby my husband finally had to get off of the thruway so I could feed him. Unfortunately he exited into a town in the middle of no where and we had to drive on deserted country roads for another five minutes until we finally saw a church. We pulled into the empty parking lot and I breastfed our son in the backseat of the car. A cop kept driving by the church and staring at us though he never approached us. I can only imagine what he thought was happening.

With the baby fed we thought we were in the clear. This was not so because it was at this time that our son decided he hated his infant carseat. We had to drive for almost four hours straight with a screaming baby in the back seat and me sitting next to him trying to find anything that would make him happy. He simply would not be consoled.

When we finally got home our nerves were frazzeled and I was on the verge of tears myself. I decided being cooped up in the house wasn't so bad and resolved that no matter how many kids we had, we would never take a baby on a road trip ever again.