A REAL, LIVE, GROWN-UP DATE!

Believe it or not, my husband and I were able to enjoy a wonderful night out on Saturday! We got to dress up, drink wine, eat good food, and support a great cause all at the same time, while our little ones were in the loving hands of Grandma.

After many months of near destitution, we were saved by the graces of Uncle Sam’s lovely little tax return; able to catch up on bills, pay off some debt, and treat ourselves to a date. You know you badly need some time alone together when your four year old daughter furrows her brow, sweetly looks into your eyes and tells you, “Mom….you and Daddy need to go on a date!” Well, okay, sweetie, we certainly will!

We recently performed some calculations, and after careful considerations, discovered we average a date every six months. When your numbers are this desperate, you need to make good use of that date night time frame, squeezing in as much relationship-building, couple bonding as you can; as if that doesn’t put the pressure on. So this time we wanted to do something really fun and indulge ourselves a bit. Several years ago, my mom had given us tickets to a wine-tasting fundraiser event for a local organization that houses adults with disabilities. It was so much fun, that we decided we would go again this year, except this time we bought tickets for the formal reserve wines night.

Though of course that formal word caused a little bit of outfit panic on my part; I became determined to find the perfect dress to wear, resulting in many late-night online searches that only left me knowing what I did NOT want to wear. The date finally loomed very near (that night!), and I found myself desperately scouring the clothing section at Target on the family run to the store for odds and ends. I ended up buying a dress and a little black sweater to wear over it.

Flash forward to later that evening; I’m getting ready, curling my hair, trying to occupy the kids, when I realize my new dress is not only not formal enough, but it doesn’t even look good on me! So I pull out a dress from a summer wedding a couple of years ago and put my new sweater over it, and surprise-surprise, it looks pretty dang good. Except…..for shoes. I have a gorgeous pair of peep-toe shoes for summer, but it is February, and I have to wear nylons with my winter-white skin and the cold air outside. So I try cutting out the toes on one pair of nylons, but the stark contrast between my nylon-clad “tan” legs and my un-pedicured, uber-white toes makes for a bad combination. My churchy closed-toed shoes are hardly the answer to my outfit, so we have to hurry out the door when my mom shows up so I can run to the shoe store and find something appropriate to wear.

We walk into Famous Footwear, where the saleslady looks down at my terribly mismatched flats, and points us in the direction of the dress-shoes. Amazingly, my husband picks out the perfect pair, and they even have my size. We pay for them (29.99 on SALE…what luck!) and are back on our way when I realize I didn’t print off the tickets for the event! We retrace our route back home, print the tickets, and finally make our way to the wine tasting. It is moments like these when I remember why we only go out twice a year…..it is exhausting!

Despite the rocky preparations for the evening, we had such a great time. I’m pretty sure we were one of the youngest couples in the room, and certainly the poorest, as we were surrounded by doctors and other various moneybags, but I dare say that we enjoyed ourselves more than anyone else there that night. My very own Mr. Romantic was on a mission to taste as much of the food, and try as many of the wines as possible, so our evening involved a lot of beelines to the buffet tables, and weaving in and out between the sampling stations. Good food, great wine, and lots of laughter….it was an incredible night!

COOKIES!!

I am one of the leaders of my second grader's Girl Scout troop, and by default I am once again the "cookie mom" this year; a title given much prominence in the scouting world in an attempt to cover up the less glamorous side of the position. They even make cookie mom badges for the daughters to proudly display on their vests for everyone to see; but surely it is the moms buying these for their daughters, and not the daughters begging to have one.

So this afternoon we (I dragged my husband into this mess with me) contemplated on whether to take the van or his truck to pick up the cookies; you need two adults for this duty, one to drive and one to count the cases as they're loaded in. We had 50 cases to pack in (in case you're wondering, that's 600 boxes total!) and five of us, so with lack of a babysitter we chose to crowd into the truck, leaving the back open for the cookies. Of course this meant we needed to clean all the crap out of the truck first.

An hour later, we were finally on our way to the warehouse. We pulled into this truck lot where we gave them our troop number and verified how many cases we were picking up; we were then told to follow the cones which led to eight different loading stations, one for each type of cookie. At each station we had to approve that we had the right amount of cases, they’d load them in, and we’d drive on to the next one. In a matter of minutes we had all our cookies, and after verifying once again, and signing over my life to claim responsibility for said cookies, we were on our way back home.

            Upon arriving, we decided the cookies would be safe in the locked topper until I could get them distributed to all the girls during the week. But after careful consideration; realizing how popular those cookies are and that they just might melt on this unusually warm February day, I decided we probably better bring them in the house. So, all the able bodies of the family (everyone except the baby) spent about fifteen minutes marching in and out, stacking all the boxes along the kitchen wall.
            So here I sit, gazing at the atrocity across the room, dreading the work I got myself into. I have two months of this yet to go, and it’s only just begun.