Hey There, Real World.

Oh, holidays. I love you, but you sure make the return to the real world difficult. I've officially been "back to work" since Monday (though I haven't spent much time on the computer. I haven't forgotten about you, clients!) and Bob goes back to his job (that he actually has to, you know, get dressed and leave the house for) tomorrow. Today? Today we've each got our respective errands to run and commitments to keep (our attempt to actually accomplish all those things we said we were going to accomplish over break at the very beginning!) Happy Family Fun Time Holiday Party is over for another year, I'm afraid.

We had four (four!) actual dates without the baby over break. Four! That's about equal to the total number of non-family dates we'd had for the entire length of our relationship up until the holidays. Bob's sister (bravely) took K for a 48-hour block, and then two other days we sent her off to daycare and ran around like gleeful bank robbers (or, uh, someone else who just got away with something terrible and crafty. I'm sorry. I haven't written in a while. I'm rusty!) We had a sushi date with one couple. We went to a New Years Eve shindig with another where I *almost* had enough celebratory beverages to make a public performance of Space Ghost's entire OHIO song seem like a brilliant idea. We ate places where no one asked us, "Do you want a high chair or a booster?" and we got to sit through movies without having to hush/rush the randomly screaming toddler out of the theater halfway into the film. On another date we covered three states. We started in mid-Michigan, ate breakfast in Ohio, went shopping in Indiana, and then ended up back in the Great Lakes State just in time for a weirdly localized little snowstorm. (When we picked K up from daycare, we passed several cars in ditches. "Cars fall off the road! Road slippery because the snow! Be very careful!" our backseat driver warned.)

Our last "date" was a stop at a coffee shop. The same coffee shop where we were supposed to have our first date, in fact -- had it not been closed when we arrived there at 4pm on a Saturday (hey thanks, small town!). We camped out on a couch and bemoaned a particularly disappointing black and white cookie (why is it so hard to find a B&W cookie that isn't disappointing?) and worked on our invite list for the wedding. Our first real coffee date, and we spent it planning a wedding!


2010, you were full of surprises. 2011, let's see what you've got for us.

Happy (belated) new year, everyone!