Monday, January 29, 2007

Pour me a big old cup o' crazy

This weekend was a challenge in so many ways...

Amanda began a class on Saturday morning. It's a 4-week Saturday & Sunday class from 8:30am to 4pm, so I have Alastair all to myself during the days. It's fun, but he's a lot of work, and since he's working on walking right now, it's 100% constant supervision. He's also been showing signs of separation anxiety lately, so just going to the bathroom is usually accompanied by a serenade of wails.

So that's the backdrop. The real story was lunch on Saturday.

Saturday was my mother and grandmother's birthday. They don't like each other, and they're both nuts. Mom's generally more nuts than grandmother, except when they're in the same room. For some reason, that amplifies my grandmother's fruityness and makes mom calm down.

So anyway, I was supposed to pick up my grandmother at 11:15 on Saturday morning and take her to Brio Tuscan Grill at Stony Point Fashion Park. Only Alastair was sleeping at 11:15. And at 11:30. And at 11:45. For the first time in many many months, I was reduced to having to wake him up, and anybody can tell you it's not wise to wake a sleeping baby.

We leave the house, 35 minutes late, 45 minutes after he usually eats his snack, and pick up my grandmother. She's in a huff, but not because we're late: she had tried to convince my mom to meet us at her house, instead of at the restaurant. Mom resisted, and now we couldn't get her to answer any phone, so we had no idea if she'd given up and gone home. Alastair began to throw a tantrum (understandable: he was starving), and we finally got to the restaurant only 50 minutes after our intended arrival time. Grandmother's back-seat driving, strangely, didn't help us get there any faster. Whodathunk?

I got Alastair's snack on, he calmed down, we ate, mom and grandmother bitched about everything not being perfect (the food was actually pretty bad), and Alastair started pitching another fit about having to sit there so long.

How long? At 2pm, 1 hour 40 minutes after our arrival, and over 30 minutes after taking my last bite, I saw our waiter approach. I stuck my credit card in his face so that he couldn't ignore me any more, and at 2:15, we were out of there.

Now, Alastair generally naps at 2pm, so he wasn't thrilled with the delay, and mom and grandmother wanted to stand around the car and gibber about nothing at all. I was getting rather tense, and when I dropped my grandmother off at 2:25, it was a mad dash home. Poor guy was beat, and dad took a nice long nap, too.

Sunday was no less stressful, but mainly because Little Man refused to take any morning nap.

But there was a huge silver lining: last night he took his first independent shuffly steps. Only a couple, but he did take them.

And then Vivienne decided to sneak in his room as we were shutting the door for bed time. Great. At 11pm, she decided she wanted out, and I almost tanned her hide when I let her out of there.

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