Bring children to conferences

This was only my third time bringing Zoe to a conference because of our recent better options to drop her off with grandmother. But it was definitely the right time and the right conference. This one is a fairly small one with only 360 attendees, at least half which are core-participants of my research community and therefore "mommy's friends", as I explained to Zoe. It also meant that there were several other parent attendees who had brought their children. Five of the six children were between one and a half and almost three years old, two being a set of twins that Zoe has played with before and who she is very fond of.

We arrived at the hotel a day before so we had the chance to explore (this is a rule of mine, particularly when bringing Zoe, because of often unpredicted travel changes). After half a day going to the park with the twins to play, I realized that we were not going to be able to go much outside the hotel without a stroller. I had not brought one because of our extensive travel schedule but Zoe was now a bit too keen on being carried and my back does not do well with her lovely 34 pounds anymore. Luckily, at the local CVS, they had an orange with blue and green x'es and o'es umbrella stroller for $24.95, which I then 'rented', because obviously we could not bring it back home with us. Five days later I left it in the hotel room with a note asking them to give it to charity. It was worth every penny because I was now able to take a sleepy baby out for dinner and Zoe's dad took her to the Zoo with the twins one of the days.

This brings me to the reason why this conference was such a success: Zoe's dad was there and took her for a full day and half of the next one. When she was actually in and around the rooms of the conference we hung out with the other kids in a corner and played. She dealt well with my colleagues approaching her and talking to her. The only time I tried to take her with me to a session was the closing plenary. After talking to her for five minutes, explaining that she had to be very quiet and that she would get to play games on the iPad in the back, I slowly opened the door in the back of the large staged room (we were 15 minutes late because she had napped in our room). Zoe stepped inside and then let out a scream that left the full room of 300+ people to  turn around and stare at us. I quickly guided her outside again and decided that the closing plenary was probably boring anyway. And that she will have to be at least five before I try this again.

We spent the last night going out for very nice dinner with two newfound colleagues and one very old friend. Next morning we packed an overfull suitcase and took off for the airport. We have a very easy route home with only one layover and will wake up in Stockholm 8am Friday morning. Can't wait to see my own 'new' apartment.

Home sweet home

Yesterday one of the final pieces of my apartment puzzle fell into place: I was accepted by the housing association of the apartment where I'm living and which I'm buying directly from the owner. Housing in Stockholm is complicated to say the least and to have a stable home one must buy. Or be extremely well-connected to get one of the few exclusive rental places that are available. Getting accepted was a bit tricky because they decided initially to reject me on the grounds that they couldn't see I had had an income when looking at my tax papers from 2011. Which is of course true because I didn't live in Sweden in 2011. So after not contacting me for extra information or even notifying me but instead sending a physical letter to the owner who was on holiday I finally got them on the phone, explained and within 20 minutes of having sent them my employment contract, I was accepted as a member. I still wonder what the board members were thinking if they were thinking anything at any point before seeing my employment contract. How would I have gotten a mortgage without any income? But it finally seems that I will be able to sign a contract for my own apartment within the next couple of days.

This good news coincided with me being in Copenhagen to work with a colleague on research and give a talk on a my work. It was nice to be among friends and nice to see old colleagues again. But it wasn't before the train home that I started reflecting; my days had been packed and planned from the start to the end. I had managed one impromptu lunch with a newly acquainted colleague, one unscheduled coffee with a amazingly sweet new friend but every other minute had been scheduled from before I arrived. As much as I enjoy even planned socializing I really miss the kind of spontaneity that characterized my social life before, what you can have in the city you live in. For ten years my social life in Copenhagen has been pre-scheduled from I arrive because otherwise I won't get to see the people I want to, and often I still don't get to see the people I want to. Getting on the train, I sat down for the first time in four days and relaxed. Wondering what I was going to do on the five hour train journey back. Read a magazine. Write on my funding proposal. Eat chocolate. Sit and stare out the window listening to Anya Marina. With five hours on my hands I managed all of them. I reached Stockholm, and (almost) my home sweet home just past midnight.

Bringing babies to conferences

As I proudly announced about a month ago, I had a paper accepted to the prime conference in my field. It is the conference I always attend and have attended since starting my PhD, so I have been going for almost 10 years. This year the conference is in Texas in May, starting exactly the day after Zoe's second birthday. Which means that, opposite last year, I am not considering bringing her. She would be an international full flight fare. Non-expensable. Luckily, my mom has graciously offered to look after her for the week it takes to travel, attend for 4 days and travel back. Another reason I am not going to bring her is due to last years experiences of bringing a baby to conferences:

Being part of an academic couple that actually publishes and attends the very same conferences presents a few perks and a lot of complications. The perks are that we save on hotel money, travel together and then of course, generally have someone to go home with at the end of the evening (yes, conferences are great for hooking up, in fact we initially hooked up at a conference ourselves, albeit one that Mark actually didn't attend but sneaked into to chat me up...). The complications before we had Zoe were negligible but now we are facing a whole new set of factors. Last year we had two conferences where we both wanted/needed to go, one in China when Zoe was 10 months and the conference described above, in Canada when she had just turned 1. Because of her age and since we didn't live near family in California, the only choice was for one of us to stay home with her or for us to bring her. We decided to bring her for both trips with remarkably different outcome.

It turns out that 10 months is the ideas travel age for a baby and now that I know this, I cannot stop recommending parents to take a trip (if that is a possibility) at exactly this time. It is also the ultimate 'bringing baby to a conference' age, especially if the conference is fairly small and is mostly attended by close colleagues/friends. We had an amazing time, Zoe got all the right attention and I actually felt I was able to attend the conference. A few key highlights include Zoe sleeping through two sessions in my wrap, while I attentively listened to my colleagues' presentations and her sitting in a high chair munching rice and fortune cookies while we ate lunch and chatted with same colleagues. She was small enough to still be carried on my front easily, she could fall asleep there and she was still mainly breastfed, making the stress about food non-existing.

However, it turns that 12 months is the worst time to take a baby to a conference. At this time she had started scooting (hopping on her bum to get forward, something that especially bright babies do just before they learn to crawl and then learn to walk...), which meant that she was not happy just sitting down. She needed action around her, preferably right now and if it didn't happen she made sure to let me know her annoyance. Loudly. She was not sleeping easily in a carrier, in fact I had to roam the hallways for hours to get her to go to sleep in her stroller, the mode of transportation that we had now adjusted to. She had found her temper and stubbornness and did not take a "wait one minute" very lightly. I spent an hour in the conference center's medical room where they had let me in to nurse her because all other comfy corners seemed full of colleagues that I would like to be able to look in the eyes again later on. But most of all, I felt like a mom at this conference. Zoe had taken over my professional personality. Where she at 10 months could be sitting quietly in her carrier on me, and still be just an accessory, now she was a full fledged proof the I was a Mom with capital M. Gone was professional Dr. B, the author of several well-cited articles and known for insightful research within interesting subfields. Instead was a Mom who had crashed an academic conference. Some people talked to me, even with Zoe scooting at my feet, but others clearly avoided me, as if they didn't want to succumb to the Mom-ness. It didn't help that Zoe had recently decided that Mommy was best. Leaving her with her dad would introduce a fit of screaming, of course only until I was out of sight, but this was enough for me to hesitate handing her over. The end result was that I got to see one actual session the whole conference. The remaining time, I either rolled Zoe around in her stroller trying to find the new exciting thing that would entertain her (escalators anyone?) or roamed between three sessions because when I finally had an hour, I hadn't had the time to check the program and walked into the wrong session but didn't realize for 10 minutes. Then of course there was my own presentation and a session I was chairing, neither which included topics of great interest to me (including my own presentation, yes).

After Zoe finally fell asleep an hour into the conference reception I left her 

in her stroller in a corner with a this note: "If I cry please call my mom or 

dad [phone numbers]". It was the best hour of the conference.

Although, or perhaps because, my field is largely male dominated (however my subfield is closer to 30/70), we have frequent discussions about bringing children to conferences. Opinions are generally openminded and encouraging, but also cautious of directly accommodating parents and children. In fact, when the conference is located in the US, insurance issues dictate that we are not allowed to bring children into the conference centers (a problem I obviously wasn't faced with last year). I wish I could be wholeheartedly arguing for parents always bringing their children if they need to but my personal experiences illustrate the ambivalent issues at place here: when is it possible to bring a baby and still remain professional, still feel that you are being taken seriously as a colleague? (because we all know that screaming "No, you cannot eat that plant/take off your clothes/throw that muffin at the nice senior professor who I always hoped would respect my work" at your toddler does not improve one's professional look.) And when is this just not possible and you need to actually skip the conference if you cannot find suitable childcare? Well, I found the fine line between the two, but the hard way. However, I hope to at least pass on my experiences to new academic mothers who have to make the tough decisions of what do with their baby when attending a conference.