Events of the Weekend

I paid Lucy a penny to let me brush her hair tonight. It totally worked. I think I'm on to something here. A year of crying-free hair brushing is DEFINITELY worth $3.65.

In other Lucy hair news, baby girl just had her first salon haircut on Sunday, as I suggested I might do in my last post. The following pictures are not the greatest because they were taken with M.'s phone, and I was the person TAKING the pictures, and I don't actually really know HOW to take pictures with M.'s phone. So... yeah.

Unlike Finn, who just gets a sprayed with a bottle of water to wet down his hair before any scissor cutting begins, Lucy got the real deal - shampoo and conditioner in the salon sink. She was a little weirded out by it, but actually tolerated it better than her bathtime shampoos (which she does not tolerate at all).

I think she looks kind of creepy-dead here. And since that didn't really seem plausible, she had me convinced that she had fallen asleep for a moment.

Good haircut juju was all used up by the end of the shampoo, and Lucy freaked out about sitting in the big chair to get her hair cut. Perhaps she was convinced that the haircutting was already over? To get around it, she ended up sitting on M.'s lap. Doesn't he look lovely in leopard print?

It wasn't exactly smooth sailing once Lucy was on M.'s lap. She kept hiding her head in his chest, effectively preventing the stylist from getting to her hair. It was a four-man effort to get Lucy to straighten up and keep her head still - the stylist, M., me, and the nice woman who shampooed Lucy's hair. The shampoo woman crouched down for at least 10 minutes, attempting to distract Lucy. I tipped heavily, because I'm afraid she may now need knee replacement surgery.

Not pictured: The blow dry (yes, she even got her first real blow out!) and the final result. Because the entire 25 minute process was about 20 minutes too long for a toddler, and by then we were all exhausted.

In other news this weekend, M. and I went on a date!! For hours. More than 7 luxurious hours without the children!

We schlepped into D.C. on the Metro, a process that took longer than forever because of track repair goings-on that have the Red Line down to a single track. I stayed zen, though, and didn't let my typical transportation fury take over.

Part one of the date involved a couple of stops of a bar crawl that a friend of mine had organized. We first went to Granville Moore's, a place M. and I have been wanting to go to every since I read Amalah's blog post about the Throwdown with Bobby Flay episode that was taped there. An episode I subsequently watched, which then very much made me want to eat Moules Frites. Moules and frites were consumed, and were as good as I had hoped they would be. Also consumed - some kind of belgian beer, very tasty. We then moved on to nearby Biergarten Haus, where I had a very yummy Hefeweizen and M. had some kind of Hofbrau lager. Not pictured: Any photos from this portion of the date.

Part two of the date was dinner for just the two of us at Oyamel, a great "tapas" style restaurant with mexican-themed dishes.
Here I am waiting for my drink and the first of the food to start coming out. This would also be where I would show you a picture of M. dressed in his date finery, if I hadn't somehow NOT taken the picture I thought I was taking with M.'s phone. See again: I don't know how to work the damn thing.

This is my drink - a margarita with SALT FOAM. No simple salted rim here. Foam. It was awesome.

The food was awesome, too, especially the guacamole made fresh and tableside. We ate so much of it that this was the only dessert we had room for - Mexican coffee. Also very, very good.

Once I realized that I hadn't actually taken a picture of M. out on our date, I snapped this one on the Metro ride home. The very long Metro ride home (preceded by the very long wait to actually get on the Metro train).

Luckily we had left D.C. early enough that we weren't terribly late (all in the name of not paying the babysitter the equivalent of a mortgage payment in one night). So we capped off the evening with a glass of red wine at home:


It was, shamefully, our first real date night since last Labor Day weekend. But it was worth the wait - the right mix of socializing with friends, time to connect with each other, and trying/eating/doing new things.

Here's hoping it won't take us another 11 months to have another one!