Date For Deux

The pops and I managed to wrestle a date night out of our busy schedules last night and it was a great time. We would like to do it more often but the biggest challenge is the finding the sitter part. I remember a time when the biggest challenge was the anxiety of leaving him behind but now mama is eager to shed her baby leech and enjoy an evening playing footsie with daddy in a nice restaurant at least once a week. Our sitter(s) this time around ended up being daddy’s guitar player and his on again/off again girlfriend who is quite lovely and said guitar player needs to get off of the pot and hook up with this gal long term. He’d be a fool to let this one go. Hubby told me that she wants to have kids and we were laughing because we know that Willem has the ability to inspire women to drag their favorite mates to bed caveman-style. I popped the spider monkey into his stroller knowing that shuttling him off in the other direction would make for an unemotional getaway for all. We got a kick out of watching daddy’s guitar player navigate Willem’s ride down the street as the sometimes girlfriend gave directions on traffic and technique.

We headed off to a delicious restaurant called Taverna in the newly refurbished downtown area of Austin, a couple of blocks that have been given a facelift and could be anywhere USA. Dinner was great but the service was bubblier than my Proseco. The waitress's giddiness made my head hurt. I wasn’t too fond of the décor and despised the flat screen TV perched just beyond the dining room. Hubby kept looking over my shoulder with that “dead air space” look on his face and I knew that there was either a TV or a busty bartender nearby. To make matters worse, they were showing one of those poker tournaments. We both love poker but this wasn’t the time or place to be watching. We committed gluttony and headed over to Jo’s Coffee to watch the wonderful singer/songwriter, Amy Cook, perform. We sat outside and kibitzed with friends, old and new. It was an instance where worlds collide and planet earth suddenly seems so small. Amy’s girlfriend, Liz, is from Marfa, Texas, a place I fell madly in love with back in April 2004. Ever since, I have been begging and pleading for hubby to purchase for wifey a tiny plot of land there. “What are you going to do with this land?” he asks. “I will take a blanket and sit in the middle of it while gazing at the stars, the cactus, and mountains in the distance.” I reply. Something about this place feeds my spirit in the most complete and serene way like I once belonged there lifetimes before. I drive the surrounding roads and my heart races as I look deep into the distance of the land, inhale the unpolluted air, and watch nature beat it’s pace of life in it’s purest form. Marfa, itself, is a funky community of artists, filmmakers, ranchers, border patrol, and the well-to-do. The people do contribute to the liveliness of the tiny town but it’s the scrubby terrain, the fenceless acreage, and vast skies that sends me. Anyway, Liz is a creator of lovely spaces in Austin and in Marfa. This and this she helped design. She is beginning a project in Marfa that involves land, Sparton trailers, and a myriad of other things that I will keep under wraps for now. It’s all still in its infantile stages of planning but I’m getting one, dammit, and nothing is going to stop me. I see this to be the chance to carpe diem and I’m carpe-ing all over it! It is a dream come true.

Baby woke at 5 a.m. this morning (WHY???) and he was hot for mama and wanted to have a pre-dawn party for two so we ate and played and read books and did all of the stuff we should be doing AFTER 6:30 a.m. He went back to sleep at 8 a.m. and didn’t wake up until 12:30 p.m.! I called home to check in and daddy said baby was still asleep (this was at 12:15) and I was like “ARE YOU SURE HE’S BREATHING! DID YOU CHECK ON HIM EVEN! SOMETHING’S WRONG!” My co-workers were all spun around in their chairs staring at me. So he took a marathon morning nap and I’m wondering if this is normal? I stopped by the house like I do everyday to pump and grab a bite to eat but it never usually works out that way b/c baby lays eyes on me and he’s like an octopus. I sit him down and he shrieks. Daddy tries to hold him and you’d think he'd attached him to the ceiling fan and turned it on high. I’ve decided to start packing my lunch and breast pump and forgo the trips home anymore. It’s just too disrupting for me, the nanny, her kid, the husband, the neighborhood, the ozone layer…

Mr. Big Foot...