We brought Lucas to the mall for his first ever shopping trip. Right when we parked our car and started to pull out the stroller from the back of the car, I got the weirdest feeling. I said to myself, “Wow, what am I doing?” Now, I’m actually one of those people that I used to gawk at pushing their baby-filled strollers at the mall. Then, as we walked into the mall entrance, I had the paranoid feeling of everyone looking at us with our stroller. I thought maybe these people think that we were too young to have a baby. But I’m sure it was just my new parent paranoia. We saw a lot of young people around and I started to wonder “What if we see someone we know???” That would have been extra weird.

Then as we started to stroll down the mall, there were many small steps along the way…we suddenly realized that we had to push towards the ramps that we never used before. It’s a totally new part of the mall that we never used and I was freaking out about that. It was the same feeling when we wanted to go upstairs and realized that we couldn’t use the escalator anymore. I’ve been to this mall a hundred times and I didn’t even know where the freaking elevator was. It was insane. Waiting with the other stroller moms for the elevator, we realized that the mall experience will never be the same again.

We made sure to go right after he fed at home so as not to deal with the hassle of feeding him there, but of course we ended up being out and about for over four hours. Lucas got fussy after hour three, so Tey had to breast-feed in the Ladies Lounge at Macy’s. That took about 30 mins and we decided to go home after that. It was such a weird experience. I’m sure future mall outings won’t feel as weird, but for trip number one, it was jarring.