I’d first like to thank everyone for the outpouring of support after last week’s post.  Beyond the comments here at The Shopping Mama, I got emails and text messages that truly made me feel like I was being heard.  They also made me realize that I have a few readers who actually look for my post each week, which made me feel even more special.  I’m glad that I’m writing things that engage you and hope that you’ll continue to read (and comment!) often.

If you are one of those regular readers, you might notice that this week’s post is a bit delayed.  As a fundraiser for a big  university, I spend a good amount of my work time traveling.  I normally write each week’s post in the couple of days before it is posted, but Hurricane Irene made it hard to get much done on Sunday or Monday.  And yesterday, I was in Washington DC for work, but the trip yielded a story of mommyhood that I thought I’d share.  When I’m in the office, I have a handy dandy electric breast pump that I use three times a day, but when I’m on the road, I carry a Medela Harmony hand pump and two bottles in a small breast milk cooler.   When I arrived at Union Station in DC yesterday morning, I ducked into the bathroom (unfortunately usually the only place I can find to pump while traveling) and started to assemble my pump when I realized I was missing a part!  It was this.  The smallest part of the entire operation, but without it the pump is useless. After my initial reaction involving lots of curse words and some foot stomping, I turned to my handy smart phone.  I needed to get from Union Station to my first meeting in Georgetown with a stop to pick up little yellow valves in between…all within 40 minutes.  DC has no…I repeat, NO…Targets or Kmarts in the downtown area.  I would have even broken my lifelong boycott of Walmart for this emergency, but no dice.

I Googled furiously until I found  The Breastfeeding Center of Greater Washington.  It was located in Foggy Bottom – sort of on my way to Georgetown – but I couldn’t tell if it was just an educational facility that sold stuff only online and there didn’t seem to be any set business hours.  With only an address, I made a beeline.  Sure enough they were open and had a pretty extensive inventory that included my much-needed valves.  The ladies who work there and one other customer had a great laugh when I told them my story.  And I found sweet relief just a few minutes later in the bathroom of a Georgetown Barnes & Noble. So…thank you to the wonderful and patient ladies at The Breastfeeding Center and to Steve Jobs for inventing the iPhone.

That little story sort of ties into the theme of this week’s post: the instinctual things we do as protective parents that we never dreamed we’d do before we had kids.  My panic levels were tested twice last week as the East Coast was hit with both an earthquake and a hurricane – and if you were in the Philly area during the storm, a couple tornadoes too. On Earthquake Day, Charlie was at home with his dad so I tried to continue my work day after the tremors were over.  Within two hours of the quake I was headed home, just needing to see Charlie and know that he was okay.  As news outlets started encouraging people to buy supplies like water and canned food for Hurricane Irene, I worried more about getting water for Charlie’s bottles than whether or not we had enough tuna and crackers.  Living in the northeast, I’ve been through some good blizzards and a couple tropical storms, and I’ve never really felt the need to rush out for supplies or to batten down the hatches around the house.  But this time was different because we had Charlie to worry about.  Everything in our backyard was tied down and secured, our water supply was plentiful, and we had more chips, spaghetti-o’s, and canned chili than we could possibly need.  I even went out and got an extra propane tank for our grill in case we had a longstanding power outage and had to cook food from our freezer before it spoiled.  On the night of the storm, I didn’t sleep a wink.  I sat on the couch, with Charlie sleeping soundly in my arms, watching the Tornado Warnings flash across the screen, poised to sprint down the stairs to the basement.  And yes, as the wind howled for hours on end and the rain water started to leak into our kitchen and destroy a portion of the interior wall, I cried.

We were luckier than some others once the storm was gone.  We had electricity and our basement did not get flooded.  The damage to our house was intense but fixable.  I have relatives in NJ who still don’t have power and are under a boil water advisory.  Entire towns in New England and upstate NY are all but washed away.  Despite that, what surprised me most about the storm was my reaction to it.  While I’d definitely qualify a lot of how I felt as panic – mostly over keeping Charlie safe – there was also an underlying determination.  I was scared but I was going to fight like heck to make sure my little guy got through it.  Underneath it all, I just knew that I would do what needed to be done for Charlie.  It’s a sort of steady self-confidence that felt new to me.  And I liked it!

When did you first catch a glimpse of your protective instinct as a parent?  If you are east coaster, how did you do during Hurricane Irene?