Little Footsteps in the Big World

Oh it's been forever since the last time I wrote a post! I returned to work in January after a year of maternity and parental leave, so I'm basically now juggling between getting back in the game with my job, doing my PhD research (that is more or less abandoned), driving my two kids around (who unfortunately attend two different kindergartens, go to french classes, sport training and painting classes) and co-managing the household (forgotten laundry, overcooked dinners, sticky floors, messy kitchen) with a husband who's on business trips a lot. On top of that, we found out recently that we're moving abroad (hint, hint!) so things have been quite stressful More coffee wine please! Remember two business trips that happened during my maternity leave, to China and to Azerbaijan ? So my first business trip now that I'm officially back at work was to the Netherlands. Or as my firstborn said, to the Neverland (she's quite shocked to find out that I was visiting Pet...

It's pretty often when I see memes on my facebook timeline with similar phrases to "vacations with kids are basically business trip". And in my personal opinion, it's also the other way around: when you have kids, business trips are basically vacations. Well don't get me wrong, I enjoy traveling and vacationing with kids. As you might have noticed from my previous posts, we travel and vacation a lot with kids. However though, like most moms with babies, once in a while I wish I could just have a night away from the kids to just sleep for eight (or even six!) hours straight. And business trips, for me, are the answer to this. Of course I could easily have a night out with the girls, or with my husband, and leave the kids for a night to the grandma (or a sitter). And I do that, now and then. However, my needs sometimes extend beyond the need to sleep alone. I also miss being just by myself sometimes. Not being someone's mother, or someone's wife. I used to...

"Did you write anything on your blog about China?" my husband asked me yesterday. "I didn't plan to, why?" I asked him back. "Well, because it's very interesting, I think it makes a good story". Then a friend texted me, one day after my arrival back to Zagreb (read: I was heavily jet-lagged and exhausted) to, literally, ask me to let my husband come to his place to drink, alone, and leave the kids with me, because, and I quote, I already enjoyed myself for five days. At this point I decided to write how my first child-free trip truly went. To have fun? Sure I'd like to. To enjoy myself for five days? Who wouldn't want that? Honestly, what I wanted to do in China was just sleep. To finally sleep. You read the reason why I was leaving for China for a week . So I left a toddler and a baby with my husband at home. Long story short, I was on the plane heading to Vienna from Zagreb. It was a 45-minute flight so it was fine. I had a short la...

In this world we're living today, we all get judged for everything. Especially if you're a mom. Unless you're a mom who lives in a cave deep in the jungle with no one else around. We're judged for formula feeding. For breastfeeding. For leaving the kids for work. For staying at home. For putting a baby in a crib. For sharing the bed with the baby. Everything we do is wrong. Smirks in the park, hate comments in social media. Imagine a mom who has to leave a five-month-old to go somewhere very faraway, for business reason, for a week. And I happen to be that mom.  If you've been reading my blog, you know that I -we- always, always take the children when traveling. We take them wherever we're going, and they enjoy the trips as much as we do. But for business trips I can't really do that, can I? Here where we live, we're lucky because parents get 12 paid months of maternity leave (14 months if dads use his part). With my firstborn my first business t...