We did it. We had our first real date night since baby was born. It took some work, some tenacity, to get there.
My parents arrived on Thursday. I began the training then. Started them on diapering and in true form, Jonah provided MULTIPLE opportunities for them to practice. Next we gave the Boo a bottle — just to make sure he’d still take one as I had NOT been doing the bottle-a-day as recommended by the ped to get him used to it, nor even the 2-3 bottles-per-week as many friends have told me they’d done.
He took it just fine. I had a feeling my boy would not turn down food in any form.
Friday morning we had babysitting practice. My massage therapist came over to work on me, and I gave the boy to mom and dad for 2 hours (Scott was at work). It went well. This was probably more practice for me than for them. But, they passed the test, handling diapers, bottle, and nap with aplomb.
I called the hot tub place. Unfortunately, they were all booked up for the night, so movie it would be.
Friday afternoon my parents suggested we go out somewhere — for lunch, a little shopping, something. But I couldn’t handle it. Two activities (massage, date) in one day were enough for me. Plus it was raining and so cold.
Actually, later on, we almost made it out the door for the half-mile walk to a neighborhood cafe. I pulled out our beautiful Zooper Twist stroller, attached the cold weather boot, found the rain cover and figured out how to attach that as well, and then came the question of whether the stroller takes the bucket, or could we just put the boy in it, lying down. In shopping for said stroller, I was led to believe we could do either, but couldn’t find confirmation in the instruction manual. We called the 800 number. Turns out we can do neither. It will be a nice stroller for him when he’s six months old. Sigh.
Without proper rain protection for the snap-and-go, long walk plan was retired in favor of short walk in bjorn, around the block, to get the boy to nap.
In the end, even dinner AND a movie seemed like too much, so we opted for Vietnamese take-out at home with mom and dad, and then an 8:15 show.
I put on my pretty new brown shirt-dress, green tank top, pre-pregnancy jeans (wahoo!), my non-mom shoes (high-platform clogs that are too dangerous for while carrying a baby around). Scott, seeing my outfit, picked a color-coordinated olive-and-gray striped shirt and brown suede jacket. I pumped a little milk into a bottle for the boy and put it on the kitchen counter — which my mom, in her zeal to be helpful by thoroughly cleaning up, threw out and washed before I could tell her what it was, causing me to freak (oh nooooooooooo, my precious freshhhhhh miiiiiiiiiiiiilk) even though there was more in the fridge and freezer.
Thus it was that well-dressed, albeit flustered, we made it out the door.
I like to think that God wanted us to have a nice evening because we got a parking space right across the street from the theater, in spite of the fact that it was Friday night and raining.
What movie did we see? Juno. And even though the theater was PACKED, the seat on one side of us was broken, and the seat on the other side of us was up tight next to a wall, so no one bothered to sit there and we actually had this little cone of privacy around us.
As soon as the film ended, we headed home. It was late, yes, and after watching a flick about pregnancy and parenthood, we especially wanted to get back and snuggle with our own baby.