I’m sitting in a meeting about upcoming marketing initiatives with a dozen or so Kars4Kids team members. Discussion grows lively as ideas are tossed out, challenged, rehashed and debated. I’ve just finished a heated defense of my proposal when a head pokes in the room, gesturing discreetly in my direction. I take my cue and exit, stage left. I’m off to nurse my not-quite-three month old baby, seamlessly switching gears from professional to mommy.

Welcome to the pleasures of onsite day care. Heralded as the wave of the future, employer-sponsored day care has many benefits for employers and employees alike. The expense for employers is offset by reduced absenteeism and higher employee retention. And what working parent wouldn’t appreciate help with child care?

But onsite daycare creates its unique set of challenges. Don’t get me wrong. I’m immensely grateful for my access to day care that is painlessly deducted from my paycheck pre-tax. That eliminates my need to make extra stops in my morning and afternoon commute. That is available for me whenever I need it. That allows me to continue to breastfeed even while working fulltime.

And I don’t envy my fellow mothers who have to scramble for babysitters to cover the extra hours after playgroup ends. Who pump at work or just quit nursing when they returned to work.

But you do run into some interesting situations when you nurse at work. Not everyone realizes how time-consuming breastfeeding a newborn is. And you can’t always fit it neatly into your schedule either, as I learned the hard way the other day:

I have an important meeting scheduled with our CEO. I stick my head into his office, but he’s still tied up with other meetings, so he signals for me to come back in a few. I head back to my desk to wrap up some loose ends on a project I’m working on, when the phone rings. The caller ID reads: babysitting room. Shoot. Was it really three hours already since I’d last fed my insatiable baby? “He’s ready for you,” they say. “He’s starving.” At the rate my baby eats, I’ll be really late for my meeting. How am I going to explain this to the big bad boss?

Still, nursing dilemmas aside, employer-run day care is definitely a step in the right direction in making the workplace accommodating to women with young children. And as a working mother of two, it’s a benefit worth more than- well, not more than health insurance, maybe, but still a whole lot.