Highfalutin plans gone bad

I took this picture, already imagining its caption. I had planned to take some chichi photos of my day out, blogger style, capturing the fantasticness of my gadabout town. Instead, I was taking a picture of a crumpled paper take out bag with a wry expression on my face. What, exactly, happened?

You know how so many blogs show folks visiting every tasty, hip and photogenic spot as if all life's a picnic? Is it all so glamorous and cheerio? Doesn't anyone ever have a bad day? Well I did and thought I'd share, because hey, why not have a dose of reality round these parts? 

Who planned this bad date? Me.

It was going to be our second "date" out on the town without Will and there was much anticipation, but the greater the anticipation, the greater potential for disappointment. 

There I was, scrubbed clean, made up, dressed in my date-iest new dress, beaming with excitement. Leaving Will behind with my mother, I felt like a teenager footloose and fancy free. I had insisted on planning the date myself and picked a restaurant downtown, an area we rarely make it to with baby in tow. It was a seemingly chic new cafe with rave reviews and food that appealed to my (admittedly esoteric) sensibilities. 

Unfortunately it went downhill from there. The restaurant seated us in a crammed spot that required one to be quite thin to squeeze into - my butt cheeks nearly touched the other table. We were so very close to people on either side, we were practically eating with them and could hardly hold a private conversation. All of this crowding was the downside of chic, I suppose. Our waitress was terse. It was sweltering and the AC wasn't on. And while I found the asian bent of the menu appealing, my hubster, who was expecting something different, did not, and was not pleased when his dish arrived, resembling an asian canal. The fury of the bad date gods unfurled and bad moods were unleashed, made worse by the feeling of time passing and the pressure to have fun on this rare opportunity.

When we finally escaped the cafe, the pent up feelings and pressures of new motherhood seemed to explode into the forefront of my mind, and I was embarrassed to be crying in the car when I wanted instead to be the fun, hip, pretty, happy, easygoing wife. I was not. My husband somehow endured me anyway.

On the way home, we stopped through the drivethrough and ordered our favorite coffee drinks and arrived home to find my kind mother giving Will a bottle. We both sat and watched our little angel with big eyes drink up and then we snuggled up for an afternoon nap, all three of us on the bed.

Just the night before, my husband and I sat on the couch after Will went to sleep and watched Raising Arizona on Netflix and had much more fun. Ironic? Or a clue that sometimes the best moments happen unplanned, in the casual spontaneity of mundane life?

Someday we will have other dates. And someday we will laugh about this date (I hope).