Night Out

Tim and I had a big night out this past weekend. It was thoroughly planned and not planned at all. Since I'm usually such a big planner it was sort of nice to kind of just "go with it" and not have it all planned out. All we knew was that we were meeting some old friends who we haven't seen in a year. As far as the logistics of getting there and childcare, that was obviously planned. I have never left Ella overnight. The last time I left Samantha I was pregnant with Ella. It was about 1 year and 20 months ago, July 2008. We had 2 babysitters coming. One during the day and one in the late afternoon to sleep over. I agonized for weeks over whether or not we should actually stay over. We didn't actually book the hotel until the night before we left.

There are many days when Ella still doesn't sleep through the night. So to leave her with someone overnight was creating a lot of anxiety and guilt for me. What if she wakes up? What is she wakes up and needs me? More importantly, what if the person watching her is really bothered by the fact that she wakes up? Tim reminds me, we are paying them, it comes with the package of agreeing to watch kids overnight. They might wake up...

So we compromised. We stayed over. But we took a 7:45 train back home. It seemed as though we should at least get to sleep in since we never do. But the anxiety and guilt got to me. I had to get back to my children. And honestly, waking up at 7 by choice was not so bad. Waking up without screaming children or children clawing at you to get up, is really nice, so nice in fact that I didn't mind so much what time it was. We'll get there, eventually we will sleep over somewhere and get to sleep in. Not just yet though. when you haven't been out of the house alone in so long I'll take what I can get.

And now to the night out without plans:
We got to NYC about noon. We walked around, met up with Tim's brother to have lunch in Chinatown. It wasn't my favorite, but it was nice to have something different that we don't often get anymore. Then we walked and walked. Went to the Moma store and bought gifts for the kids. Then we headed to the hotel to quickly change and meet our friends. At this point it was 4:30 (amazing how quickly time goes when you're alone and don't have much time). I wanted to savor every minute and make it last longer. We still didn't know where we were eating. This was amazing for several reasons number one, my husband is a chef, we used to live in NYC and he always knows where he wants to eat.

We eventually made it to the Hells Kitchen area. We found a cool beer garden where we got a drink. We got lucky and found a restaurant two doors down. We met our friends and had a really great dinner. It was so fun to reconnect and see the similarities in our lives even though we don't actually get to talk very often anymore. Unfortunately due to babysitter issues they had to leave after dinner. This left Tim and I trying to figure out how to spend the rest of our night. We started walking back towards our hotel.

This is when we made the night altering decision to see a movie. It sounded simple enough. We never get to see movies anymore. There was a huge theater right in front of us. What should we see? We are so out of the loop that we hadn't heard of many movies. So we picked the movie that was just starting. Precious.... Do you see where I'm going here? I heard of it once, a friend mentioned it was depressing but good. Ummm... not sure if that's how I would describe it. More like a "date night killer". I actually wound up walking out. I have never done this before. It was only 5 min from the end when I left. I found it so disturbing. And I don't get disturbed easily. If I was prepared for what the movie was about, it would have been different. But I wasn't. And it totally ruined my night.

Well we have a good 2 years before doing it again.