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!

Welcome to the Dark Side

Well, we did it. We have given Finn regular access to the television, the source of all the world's evils, or something like that.

Up until now, Finn as a conscious being has seen very little TV. Yes, I did sustain myself and the many long hours of breastfeeding during my maternity leave by parking myself in front of the TV, but Finn was pretty oblivious then. Once we moved to our current house, the TV went down into the basement, while most of our days were spent up in the main living area with all of Finn's toys, the kitchen, etc. In addition to getting M. and I out of the habit of ALWAYS having the TV on, it had the extra bonus of making sure Finn was exposed to no adult programming and commercials because OMG, they might give my baby ADHD! And yes, I write that sarcastically, but only for show because there is a part of me that thinks it's true.

Finn's now 2, seems to be developing on track, seems pretty bright... so we didn't see a lot of harm in starting to introduce him to some of the children's programming and movies that are appropriate for his age now. But most importantly (and selfishly), the main motivation for bringing a TV into our living room now is the impending arrival of Finn's brother or sister. Seriously, there is still an imprint of my rear end on the arm chair where I did most of my daytime nursing of Finn. We spent hours and hours of every day in that chair. How the hell am I going to nurse another baby AND entertain Finn, when my ass will be firmly planted in a chair for much of the day? My answer - the TV. Yes, I guess I will become one of "those" moms that uses the TV as a babysitter.

Thanks to my parents, we are now the proud/reluctant owners of a new 26" LCD TV that fits nicely in an alcove of our living room. Finn has taken very quickly to the TV, demanding it be turned on as soon as we get home from work, or as soon as we wake up on the weekends. I'm hoping it's just a temporary obsession due to the novelty, and the demands will taper off a bit (I mean, come on, what about all those new Christmas toys that are sitting, unloved, not getting attention? When is it their turn?). We don't have a cable box for the TV yet, so I've already grown weary of the "Bob the Builder White Christmas," "Elmo's World Wild Wild West," and "Cars" DVDs that we own (although the Cars movie is quite cute, actually). OMG, does Elmo have an annoying laugh or what?!?!

So far, though, Finn is not proving to be much of an independent TV watcher. I was hoping to at least get some peace and quiet (read: no constant demands to pick up a heavy 2-yr-old) when cooking dinner. Nope, Finn wants to watch TV, and he wants to watch it on my lap. I think it's partially because he still scares pretty easily - he doesn't like being alone in the living room (though the kitchen has a pass through that lets him see me while I'm cooking), and sometimes he gets scared by what he sees on the TV (for example, he is scared by the tractors and the thresher/harvester-thingy in Cars. Hell, I'M scared by the thresher, I don't blame him on that one).

So for now, the TV is less of a "babysitter," and more of a way for me to sneak in some good cuddle time while Finn sits on my lap. Dinner is no less of a challenge than before - in fact, since I try to just keep the TV off while I'm cooking (easier than trying to juggle cooking and keeping Finn company in front of it), it's just brought me more complaints from my demanding neo-TV addict. We'll see whether it ends up serving the intended purpose once the baby is born or not.

Adventures in Babysitting

Before and during my pregnancy, I had many grand ideas about parenting and the role that a child would play in our lives. In particular, while I imagined an overwhelming love for my child, I vowed that M. and I would still make time to be spouses instead of just "parents." We would make time for a date night at least once a month, and we would communicate about more than just poopy diapers and speculation on whether any new teeth are popping through.

While we have managed to have the occasional conversation about non-parent subjects like the upcoming election or how work is going, we have not been so successful on the hoped-for monthly "date night." What I didn't fully comprehend was how difficult and nerve-wracking it is to find a reliable, fun and trustworthy babysitter. I mean, I babysat all the time when I was in high school - my friends and I seemed to have no problem getting people to entrust the lives of their children to us. But it just doesn't seem as simple to find a babysitter these days. Having good grades and a younger brother (my glowing qualifications back in the day) doesn't cut it anymore. You need a resume, references, CPR certifications, early childhood classes... And you pay through the nose for these things. The going rate for a babysitter in our Maryland county is apparently $15/hour. Yikes! I was all "I remember being psyched to make $5/hr for watching 3 kids," but my mom had me beat. Apparently she used to charge 25 cents an hour. Talk about slave wages! But parents these days "want the best for their children," and clearly "the best" = "Bill Gates-like wages."

Given the complexity of finding a babysitter, where does one even begin? An obvious place to start would be family, because while every family has the odd crazy or two, you can usually trust family. They already love your child, they just have to be shown how to handle nap time and where the clean diapers are kept. Unfortunately, M. and I have no family in the area, so that's out. Another place to look is through co-worker recommendations, but most of our co-workers don't have kids, and our lengthy commutes mean those who do have kids use babysitters that live too far away from our house.

After nearly 21-months of parenthood, we are reaching the desperation point. Determined to find someone, I signed us up at Sittercity.com. Not cheap ($100 for a year-long membership), but at this point I'm willing to make a few sacrifices. We arranged to meet a young college-age woman at our house this past Saturday. Her cover letter expounded on the evils of tv-watching, the childhood education classes she has taken, and her several years of experience. She seemed if anything overenthusiastic, but this can be a good quality when trying to entertain a 1-year old. We asked her to come over for about 3 hours. The first hour would be spent watching Finn while we were in the house, and for the final 2 hours M. and I would go to Lowe's for a shopping extravaganza to kick-off our planned and increasingly imminent basement remodel.

Friday arrives, and somehow the babysitter has still not managed to e-mail us her resume and references though she has contacted us several times. M. and I start to panic a little. How can we possibly leave our precious only child with a stranger without checking her references first? A flurry of e-mails follow. M. gets a bit snippy and demands her references ASAP. He actually used the acronym, which made me cringe. It irritates me that M. is treating this as a customer/supplier relationship. He doesn't seem to understand the need to make a trusted babysitter feel like part of the family rather than a lowly employee. But trustworthiness not yet verified, I did understand where his sentiment was coming from.

We finally receive some references (though no resume), and decide to move forward with the babysitting date. However, 10 minutes after the babysitter was supposed to show Saturday morning, something makes me check my e-mail. There it is, a message sent at 1:30 am the previous night. The babysitter has a "stomach bug." I choose to believe her, though I have suspicions that she chickened out because she was afraid she'd ticked us off. The bottom line, however, is that she will not be showing up. M. and I decide it is fate. Maybe we're just not ready for the corporate approach to finding a babysitter. This is not the kind of thing that can be handled adequately over e-mail and the internet. I don't want to look at resumes and training certificates. I want to do it the way my mom did it - word of mouth from a friend, someone who's already tested out the babysitter and determined reliability.

Alas, we are now stuck with a membership to Sittercity.com, not sure yet whether we will attempt the online match-making again. We have still purchased absolutely nothing for the bathroom and office that will be constructed in our basement any week now. And worst of all, we are still babysitter-less. The desperation grows...