Family road trip...To the NOW Conference

This Father's Day weekend was spent in Indianapolis so that I could attend the National NOW Conference.

First - If you know my husband, my daughter's father, can you tell him what an awesome guy he is for agreeing to this? It's one thing to support my feminist outings, it's another to say, "Sure, let's go to the conference together." He also finally joined NOW so he can check out some of the plenaries and the workshop I did on blogging with Amy and Frau Sally.

This wasn't my daughter's first National NOW event. Her first plane ride was at age 2 1/2 months as she went with me to my first National NOW board meeting. I sat next to Eleanor Smeal, gingerly asked a few questions and breastfed right at the meeting table. So it was a bit of a homecoming for her.

I asked her at dinner on Friday night how it felt that so many people knew who she was and she knew none of them. "Weird. Very weird."

I laughed and told her that's because I'm so proud of her, that I talk about her all the time. Me thinks she's going to kill me when she realizes how often I blog about her. She has a huge fan club and she doesn't even know it. Which is why I don't blog too much about her in great detail anymore.

I not only was able to bring her to the conference because her daddy was coming as well. Initially the plan was for us to come without him and head home Saturday night to make it home for Father's Day. I had planned it that way because NOW offers free child care.

Not many conferences and sadly, not many feminist conferences, offer child care, much less free child care. It's expensive. I was told it was around $100 a day for each kid. So I'm grateful that we were able to get a few hours of child care on Saturday for her. The other time, she did hang out with daddy (mostly) or with me.

I'm grateful because she got to see me in action, meet the women I work with across the country, update a picture with Carol Moseley-Braun (I have one of the kid at age 1.5 months with CMB) and got to meet Ariel from Sticker Sisters. We left the conference with two more Sticker Sisters shirts including one for me! The kid is seriously star-struck with DIY people.

It was a different experience for me. I didn't hit the parties for one. I snuggled up in bed at a reasonable hour. I didn't volunteer with registration, credentialing or resolutions. I also couldn't run off to a few "come on with us!" offers I got. But I wouldn't have changed a thing.