Wiscon or Society of Behavioral Medicine?

[rivka]

Michael and I talked a little bit about going to Wiscon tonight. We are still thinking.

The big conference in my field is being held in Montreal this year, at the end of April. I would like to go, and if I go, my grant will pay for my plane ticket and hotel room and other expenses. The rest of the family would come along too, at our personal expense.

I don't think it makes economic or practical sense to do two family trips by airplane in two months, with a very young baby.

An issue with Montreal is that, traveling by air, we would all have to have passports. Even the Niblet, who should be about ten weeks old at the time. Which would mean trying to get usable passport pictures for a newborn (the rules about what constitutes an acceptable photo are stringent), and scrambling to get the official birth certificate from the state and the passport application pushed through. That sounds complicated.

Once in Montreal, the Niblet would probably attend SBM with me, nursing and sleeping in the sling, while Michael and Alex hung out with papersky. We could all hang out with papersky in the evenings. If I were scheduled to give a talk (hopefully I would be, about my new research), Michael would take the Niblet while I was speaking. I would be able to network.

If we go to Wiscon, we wouldn't need passports. More of our friends would be there. The Niblet would be a month older, and I seem to recall that there can be a big sanity difference between a 10-week-old and a 14-week-old. We'd have to pay for everything - no billing the grant - and obviously, there would be no professional advantages. It would probably be a hell of a lot of fun.

I am tentatively leaning towards making a Wiscon hotel reservation now, just in case, and making the final decision about where to go after I find out if SBM would want me to give a talk, or not. If they just want me to present my research as a poster, it would have a lot less appeal.

Questions about Wiscon:

1. Are you going?
2. If we wait to buy memberships until January, are they likely to be sold out?
3. How hard is it to sell or transfer memberships in the late winter or early spring?
4. Is it at all possible to arrange for adjoining hotel rooms in case, say, you want to share after-the-kids-are-asleep monitoring duty with another family?
5. If (4) is possible, would you be interested?
6. Would you look askance at someone who brought a sleeping baby in a sling to a room party?

Questions about Montreal:

7. Has anyone here ever gotten a passport for an infant? How hard was it to arrange?
8. Is it insane to think about bringing an infant to a professional conference? I've seen other people do it, but I don't know how good of a conference experience they had. Obviously I wouldn't let the Niblet cry in a lecture room, or anything.

Questions about both:

9. Is it insane to think about traveling 600-1000 miles with a preschooler and a small infant and all staying together in one hotel room?

Comments

[naomikritzer]

I am planning to go to WisCon. Memberships will probably still be available in January, but it's probably safer to just buy them now and plan to sell them if need be. (Selling memberships is very easy.) Also, you'll want childcare (it's EXCELLENT, provided by day care professionals, and free or nearly-free) and you should sign up for that ASAP, it fills before the memberships sell out.

Definitely go ahead and book hotel rooms now. I have no idea whether adjoining rooms are available, but ESPECIALLY if you want something like that, book now.

No one looks askance at sleeping babies at room parties. Sometimes people look mildly askance at obviously overtired preschoolers whose parents don't want to take them up and put them to bed because then they'd have to leave the party.

I have gotten a passport for an older infant. It was a PITA. First I couldn't find anywhere to do the photo. Then I found a passport issuing site that did them, but it was the big government center where you take a number and wait for a couple of hours. Ed had to sign a notarized statement giving me permission to get her a passport, since he wouldn't be present to apply for it. After all that, we almost weren't able to get it because Molly, who was normally incredibly mellow and friendly, freaked out completely and a passport photo of a CRYING baby is apparently Not Acceptable. A disgruntled baby is OK, though, and she did eventually calm down. But the requirements of size, angle, etc. are very specific and getting my older kids to cooperate was difficult enough, never mind an infant.

After all that, have we EVER taken them abroad? No. We have not. Despite having a friend in the foreign service who'd have put us up in Beijing! Flying is just too damn expensive right now to go anywhere interesting.

Oh, and:

9. Is it insane to think about traveling 600-1000 miles with a preschooler and a small infant and all staying together in one hotel room?

We travel by plane every year to visit Ed's family. It's not that big a deal. I mean, it is a pain in all sorts of ways but it's do-able.

[cassandre.livejournal.com]

Charlie got his passport when he was a couple of weeks old, and the only difficult part was the photo. As you say, the baby has to be Not Crying, and also awake. Every time we took Charlie out of the house at that age, in his sling, the movement of walking put him to sleep, and every time he woke up, he cried. We had a whole series of unfruitful photo sessions. Finally we had a brainstorm: we took his photo at home with a digital camera while he was lying on the bed on a white sheet. (It was at 3am, as that was the time of day he was in the best mood at that age.) The photo center then edited our photo to fit passport specifications. It worked like a charm.

Since then I've met several other families who have done the same thing: taken a home photo and had it professionally readjusted.

The nutty thing is that a baby passport is good for years, and in a few months, your kid will look nothing like the picture on the passport! Ah, bureaucracy...