Equipped with a screaming 5-week-old baby and an apprehensive husband, I found myself 11 floors above a Wegmans in the Dulles-ward direction of Washington, D.C.’s suburbs in an upper midtier hotel looming over the sort of miniature golf course they market to single adults. I was here for a “postpartum retreat,” a program designed to aid the recovery of new mothers and fathers and, if you have them, dogs, located in the sinister mall town of Tysons Corner, Virginia. 

By now, I had almost entirely written off the stay as a waste of time. My baby was 5 weeks old, and my husband and I, we felt, had already mastered parenting and spent the first few weeks smugly asking each other, “What, this is supposed to be hard?” Our baby slept soundly and only woke up to eat or have her diaper changed. Then, as if she knew she was going to a nearly thousand-dollar-a-night baby retreat and wanted to get the most bang for her buck, 12 hours before check-in, she woke up and screamed, purple-faced, for 12 straight hours.