In Lieu of a Date Night, We’ll Go with a Blog Post

Date September 18, 2007

Ah, the challenges of moving to a new town. Julie’s been checking out babysitting options practically from the moment she hit town. For the short-term — until we build up contacts elsewhere — she thought she had a winner with a babysitting service. You pay a sign-up fee, then some nominal per-use fee, and then an hourly rate. The service then sends a college student your way. There’s a 3-hour minimum, and the middleman introduces some additional transaction costs.

But, all in all, not a bad deal.

Except when the sitter is a no-show.

Julie arranged for a date night tonight, with the sitter arriving at 6:45. it’s 45 minutes past that, and there’s no answer on the sitter’s cell phone or at the service’s office. So, it looks like the date night is not going to happen.

Come to think of it, we’ve had pretty lousy luck with sitters for the past 12 months, including one night in Austin when we were heading to a wedding reception (also a sitter found through a service of sorts)! Fortunately, we were able to drop the kids at some friends’ house and then just cut our evening a little short to retrieve them.

Perhaps tonight’s sitter sensed that we’re on Day 2 of weaning Alana from her pacifier? Alana got an extension beyond the normal 2-year Wilson Cutoff due to the chaos in our lives this summer and the impending move. But, with the holidays fast approaching, and me heading back to Austin in a couple of weeks, we decided to go ahead and take the plunge. Julie snipped off the ends of all of her pacifiers and informed Alana that the binkies are now broken. Needless to say, Alana has failed to take a nap in the two days since we kicked off the weaning process. She hasn’t necessarily been distraught over the situation, but she has struggled to settle herself down for naps and at bedtime!

We had a family outting to the Columbus Zoo on Sunday. The weather was gorgeous. The zoo is literally 5 minutes away. It was one of three consecutive weekends of Jack Hanna’s Fall Festival. In short: what were we thinking!? Julie observed approximately 15 things that she had not witnessed in her (weekday) trips to the zoo to date — all of them related, directly or indirectly, to the volume of people drawn out by the fact that it was gorgeous weather and one of three consecutive weekends of Jack Hanna’s Fall Festival. It wasn’t all that mobbed, necessarily, just lots of people milling around. I will recover within a few months, I’m sure.

We’ve got company coming both of the next two weekends (my parents this weekend — en route to Maine — and Julie’s brother and his family from Akron the following weekend). That has lit a fire under Julie to tackle the basement and finish getting the unpackable unpacked. What is unfortunate on that front is that the weather has been as near perfect as it could get both yesterday and today, and Julie’s been down in the basement!

That’s hitting the highlights of the past few days. We’ve tentatively decided that we may use this Date Night That Wasn’t for me to give Julie a tutorial (and maybe even some documentation) on updating this blog.

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