The Way We Were

My awesome friend Beth watched Tater this past weekend so Brad and I could finally go out and celebrate our anniversary. She had to give me a little shove to get me out the door (literally), but once we were out we had a great time. It was fun to remember what it was like back when it was just the two of us. Going on a date post-baby also reminded us how much more awesome Dating Brad and Sandra were compared to Parents Brad and Sandra.

Here is how our night WOULD have likely gone c. 2004:

9:00 PM: Arrive for dinner at Longman & Eagle (OK, it wasn't there then, but this is hypothetical). Are told that the wait will be 1.5 to 2 hours. Who cares! More time for flirting and witty banter at the bar. Immediately order whiskey cocktails.
9:30 PM: Cocktails gone. Whee! This is fun! Tipsy Dating Sandra talks Brad into sharing a whiskey flight.
10:30 PM: We are shown to our table. Enjoy a leisurely dinner of apps, entrees, dessert and coffee. Oh, and what the heck, Tipsy Dating Brad orders a bottle of wine. We're celebrating, and it's not like we have to be anywhere in the morning!
11:30 PM: Become drunk friends with the hipster foodie guys at the table next to us.
MIDNIGHT: Convince hipsters to join us at Liar's Club for dancing and PBR's. Whee!
2:30 AM: Leave hipsters and head to local 4 a.m. dive bar for a nightcap.
3:00 AM: I'm huuuunnnnngry. Who wants PANCAKES??? Head to Hollywood Grill for pancakes and coffee.
3:45 AM: Come home and pass out, sleep until 11 AM the next day, go out for pancakes. Come home and take naps.

Here is how our night actually went:

9:00 PM: Arrive at Longman & Eagle. Are told the wait will be 1.5 to 2 hours. Crap. Will that work? We don't want Beth to be stuck at our house all night. Decide to put our name in anyway and see what happens. Head to the bar and order whiskey cocktails.
9:30 PM: Uh oh. I realize I haven't eaten since noon and am seriously drunk from one whiskey cocktail. Brad orders appetizers for us as the bar.
10:00 PM: Appetizers arrive. I ravenously and gracelessly eat crostini and cheese and drop a piece on Brad's shoe. He seems a little annoyed.
10:30 PM: We are shown to our table. We've already had our appetizers, so we order entrees. We very responsibly decide to each get a glass of wine with dinner rather than a bottle. We split a dessert, and Brad orders a double espresso.
11:00 PM: Do not become drunk friends with hipster foodies when they start chatting with Brad about his entree. Sober Parent Sandra finds them somewhat pretentious and annoying.
11:30 PM: Arrive home and fall asleep on the couch. Brad is up half the night because of the espresso. No pancakes.

OK, maybe we aren't less awesome now. Just more responsible. But I do miss the pancakes.

Mom!!!

Much like my junior high and high school experience, motherhood has involved me spending my every waking moment thinking about a guy who has no idea what my name is...until today! I've been sick all week with some kind of weird laryngitis-y cold that seemed to get worse last night. I told Brad that if I didn't get to sleep in for once I was going to seriously lose my mind. Note for you non-parents that "sleeping in" is nothing like it was back in our pre-Tate days when we had blissful, uninterrupted sleep until noon on the weekends if we wanted it. Now it means waking up at 7something a.m., going back to sleep with a pillow over your head, and being roused into semi-wakefulness every 15 minutes by the muffled sounds of your spouse dealing with varying degrees of mayhem.

Anyway, after a couple hours of super-nonrestful sleep I opened the bedroom door and heard Tate call "Mom" from the living room. I was so excited that he said my name for the first time that I picked him up and started jumping up and down like a crazy person. And once he saw how excited I was he started laughing and repeating "Mom" over and over again, which led to more jumping up and down and laughing. It was seriously the best morning ever. Not to mention that while I was asleep Brad answered a text on my phone and made a brunch date for me with my friend Beth.

As I was getting ready I looked in the mirror and realized that I'm the person is who Tate is going to forever associate with the word "Mom." It was very cool, scary, and humbling all at the same time. I also thought that Tate's Mom looks like a hot mess much of the time these days. Sorry, kid.

I'm just sitting here enjoying these bon bons and waiting for my massage....

An exchange from a rare girls' night out last night:

WEIRD GUY IN BAR I ACCIDENTLY GAVE MY (REAL) E-MAIL ADDRESS TO SINCE I'M SO OUT OF PRACTICE I FORGOT HOW TO BE MEAN TO WEIRD GUYS IN BARS: "So, what do you do for a living?"

ME: "I stay home with my 17-month-old son."

WEIRD GUY: "Yeah, I don't do sh*t either."

Reflecting on 2011

So much happened in 2011! Tate learned to roll over. And sit, crawl, stand, dance, give high-fives, give kisses to his stuffed toys, and sleep through the night. He got his first 5 teeth. He learned to say his first words (variations on "da da," something that sounds like "open" and "open this," and sometimes something that sounds like "all done"). He started to understand us too. Now when we ask him if needs a new diaper he just crawls down the hall and sits in front of the door to his room. Although whenever anyone asks him to point to Mommy he just looks at them blankly. We'll have to work on that one. He also took his first trip on an airplane, and we had our first family vacation.

We had a lot to celebrate this year. Tate turned 1 in August. Brad turned 40 in December. I'll have to post some photos of that one sometime. I actually let my parents babysit him for the first time so that we could go out and celebrate with a night of Whirlyball and other mischief (turns out Liar's Club is just as much fun as I remembered). My Mom had trouble lowering a sleeping Tater into his crib and dropped him the last little bit or so, smacking his head on the side of his crib. He cried, kept them up, and my Mom now has to go to PT for her injured back (lowering him into his crib aggravated a previous injury). It may have to be another milestone birthday before they offer to babysit again, but we really appreciated it.

We had sad times too. We had some people close to us go through a number of health challenges. We keep them in our thoughts and pray for better days ahead. And I still miss my grandmother very much and think of her often. I still can't believe that last year was our last Christmas together. It hit especially hard on Christmas Eve when I would have normally gone to the candlelight service with her at her church. It still makes me happy, though, that there is a part of her in Tater. And in me too, now that I think of it.

I remember back at the end of 2008 when I seriously considered writing a the following Christmas letter: "Dear friends and family, 2008 can suck it. Love, Brad and Sandra." It makes me very grateful for the past year.

Wedding Memories

Brad and I celebrated our 5th anniversary a couple of weeks ago by staying home with Tate, who was finishing getting over hand, foot, and mouth disease. Brad was sick as well with what we are pretty sure was the same thing. Whoo hoo! Any celebration of this milestone (5 years of wedded bliss that is, not having HFM) was postponed until January.


But speaking of weddings, if you've had one you remember all that goes into planning one. I remember it especially well since we had a 4-month engagement and I thought I was going to lose my mind. So many details. What type of invites to have. What color ink to use. Which font. What to wear. Location, centerpieces, photographer, what to serve, how to buy a condo and pay for wedding at the same time and not go broke....blah, blah, blah. Want to know what the guest takeaway was from all that 5 years later?



Last weekend we were out celebrating Brad's 40th and a friend of Brad's told me that the one thing he always remembers when he thinks of our wedding is that we had served asparagus at dinner (which I didn't even remember) and that by the end the night the men's bathroom reeked of asparagus pee. Yup, 4 months of frantic planning and the big takeaway was asparagus pee. Hilarious. So really folks, don't worry if the post office is out of the "LOVE" stamps like the crazed bride-to-be who was in line in front of me last time I was there. In five years no one will remember. But do serve asparagus.

Fall Fun, Part I

Lately I've been itching to get out of the city and do some fall camping or hiking. Since we don't have any plans in the works I've been trying to find ways to get my nature fix without leaving town. Last weekend we went up to the North Park Village Nature Center at Pulaski and Peterson. It was our first time there, and I was pretty impressed. It's a forty-six acre nature preserve that includes four different habitats: a woodland, a wetland, a prairie, and an oak savanna. (As an interesting footnote, the area used to house the city's tuberculosis sanitarium until 1974 when, owing to medical advances, there was no longer a need for one.)

Tate had a great time; he has started pointing and reaching for things now, and he wanted to touch and see everything. It was so exciting to see him so interested in nature (although he also wants to touch everything on the CTA bus, so maybe his interest wasn't in nature per se). We saw geese, a doe and her fawn, about a bazillion bees (the yellow flowers in the picture are just covered with them), and Tate's personal favorite, squirrels. We saw a handful of families with older kids, and I was thinking of how much Tate will enjoy coming there when he can walk on the trails on his own. The trails are a lot shorter than they look on the map, so it's a perfect hike for little legs. Since major roads surround the preserve you can still hear traffic and sirens so it wasn't quite as remote as we'd hoped, but it was still exciting to find a place like that in the city.

If I ever see my life flash before my eyes...

...I'll be super glad to finally know what happened to all of my lost stuff.

Today I spent the better part of an hour retracing our steps to try to find one of Tate's shoes. Tate hates shoes and socks, but I felt like I had to put them on since when I don't strangers like to tell me that he's going to be too cold (which is exactly what happened after he lost the first one and I took the other one off so we wouldn't lose it too). It was one of his cute little baseball Robeez that I bought on eBay last spring since I was no way going to pay full price for Robeez. I came home a shoe short and so grouchy Brad even went out later and looked for it, but no luck. What happened to it? Did some other kid grab it? A strong wind blew it into a sewer? Is someone's dog in bed happily gnawing on it right now? Just another of life's mysteries, I guess.

(illustration via julianmizuki.blogspot.com)