My DC Weekend, Part 1

I'm obviously back from D.C., seeing as how it's already Wednesday and everything, but I've yet to make a full recovery.  I'm much better today than I was yesterday, but still, I'm feeling the effects of pretending to be in college again. 

Apparently my body isn't what it used to be.  Or maybe it's my life that isn't what it used to be.  Either way, I can no longer burn the candle at both ends for three days straight and expect to be fully recovered after one day of recuperation.

Friday saw me spending a relatively relaxing morning with L.  I was a hot mess over the thought of leaving him, and had decided to take him to day care late so I could fit in a couple extra hours of snuggles.  I tend to hail from the camp of "Yeah, I get it, you're sad, but get over it" when it comes to things like this, but that was all before I'd actually had a baby.  

Actually, when L was roughly 1 month old, my mom agreed to watch him overnight so D and I could go and enjoy our friends' annual Christmas party and get a little sleep.  I was, to put it mildly, pumped.  I felt a minor twinge of sadness when we dropped him off at my mom's, but mostly I was like "Let's blow this joint and get to the party where I can drink for the first time in over a year!"  (Please keep in mind that I was in the pit of some severe Baby Blues and my body was they eye of a hormone hurricane.)  

But in the months following, I've come to love being a mom, to the point where it was absolutely killing me to think of leaving him for a full weekend.  We're talking physical pain in the cardiac region.  It wasn't even really guilt, either.  I wasn't feeling like I was a bad mom for taking a weekend jaunt to our nation's capitol for a wedding.  I was just feeling intensely sad at the thought of not seeing L during that time.  I was also feeling disappointed because I really wanted to show him off to my friends because, let's face it, he's freakin awesome.  

I'm getting insanely long-winded here, and I haven't even gotten to the actual weekend yet!  So anyway, I managed to keep myself from crying until after I dropped L off at day care, and then I got....slightly emotional.  

Then, I went to get a shampoo and blow-dry at the local beauty school because I wanted my hair to look nice all weekend and I wasn't sure if bringing my flat iron and hot rollers would get me sent back to a scary room and questioned for hours about whether I was a terrorist or not.  So I decided to err on the side of caution and just make sure my hair was nice before I left. 

Except the girl who scheduled my appointment thought that "Can I please get a more senior student?" meant, "Can I please have someone who literally just graduated from Level One 3 days ago" and it took me an hour and a half to get my hair washed and blown dry.  Ok, I know I have thick hair, and I know I shouldn't use my normal hair stylist as a comparison because she's freaking awesome and very experienced, but she normally takes approximately half an hour to give me an amazing blow-out.  So I was like, ok half an hour, it's a beauty school, so double the time.  Guess I should have tripled the time.  The girl (who, granted, was very sweet) literally seemed to be afraid to touch my hair.  When the clock struck 11 and I knew I had to be out by 11:20 max to get to the airport on time, I finally had to be like, Can we please hurry this up a bit?  Magically, I made it out on time.  But, unfortunately, I could have done a better job in half the time, so really it was money and time down the drain. 

So anyway, I flew into Baltimore because it was cheaper, which turned out to be the mistake of the century.  Whatever I saved financially, I lost in lack of convenience.  Turns out, DC is a big city.  Where lots of people live.  And drive.  And a 40 minute drive from DC to Baltimore is actually about 4 hours one-way in Friday afternoon traffic.  So all my friends were like, "We love you, but not enough to pick you up in that traffic" (totally understandable, by the way) and I had to take public transit to my friends' apartment. 

No problem, I've traveled through Europe on my own.  I can figure this out.  Yeah, not so much.  The information desk at the airport was more of a desk than information, so I had to blindly get on a shuttle bus and cross my fingers that I was doing the right thing.  Luckily, I befriended a nice lady from Oklahoma who knew what she was doing and took me under her wing.  I had to take the shuttle bus to the Amtrak station, Amtrak to the Metro, change colors in the middle and then finally make it to the stop near my friends' apartment, where they would pick me up.  

By the time I made it to the Amtrak station, I was really glad I hadn't brought L because, as good a baby as he is, ANY baby at that point would have been like, "What?" if you told them there was still a good two hours left in the trip.  And then they would melt down, making you the pariah of public transit.

So after I made it to the Metro, my Oklahoma Angel and I parted ways and I was on my own.  So stupid me, I just got onto the first train that came into the station.  Turns out, the colors actually mean something, and I was on the blue line instead of the orange line.  Crap.

When I FINALLY got onto the right line, there were only one or two seats free, so I went to sit down in the most convenient one.  I asked the lady in the seat next to it if I could please sit there and she gave me a look of complete shock. 

"Of course," she said, so I sank into it gratefully.  Then she looked at me and said, "You must be from out of town."  

I gave as polite a laugh as I could under the circumstances and said, "What gave me away?" in a tone that let her know that I knew it was blatantly obvious I was not from there.  I figured it was either my suitcases or the fact that I was carrying around a map of the the metro lines and studying it every 5 seconds to make sure I was on the right train.

"If you were from here you would have just sat down," she said.  I mentally made a note to never ask for a metro seat again because the last thing I wanted was a neon sign following me around, screaming "I'M A TOURIST WITH A LOT OF CASH" because though I was a tourist, I certainly didn't have a lot of cash, and really didn't want what cash I did have to be stolen.  

When I finally made it to my stop, I had been en route for over 8 hours.  I was beat.  And I didn't get to bed that evening until midnight.  

Since this post is so long, I think I'll break here for the day.  The rest of the weekend was awesome, and my reunion with L is definitely something I want to write about, so keep your browser tuned here for the follow up post(s)!