Sometimes adults want to cry too if they've done too much in a day

[dorchadas]

It's been a long time since I had enough stuff happening to write a full post about it, but this last weekend I did! sashagee asked me to take Wednesday off because Laila had a doctor's appointment where she would get her first round of vaccines, and she was worried that Laila would have a bad reaction to it. And since my boss had called me on Monday and basically said "Hey, you have six weeks of vacation, please take them," I took Thursday and Friday off too so I had a full long weekend filled with events!


Wednesday was actually pretty uneventful. We went to the doctor, who checked Laila out and weighed and measured her, and then gave her the vaccines. One of them was administered through some kind of sweet gel, but the other two were shots. Laila ate the gel, screamed like she was being murdered after the shots...and after about two minutes, got quiet. She was fine the rest of the day, so she didn't need any wrangling at all. I spent a chunk of the afternoon playing video games and reading The Space Between Worlds for my book group while Laila slept on my lap. A good day, honestly.

Thursday I had suggested that we go to Hanabusa Cafe--which had survived the plague and which worldbshiny had sent me a photo of being open a couple weeks ago--for lunch and then go to the Art Institute. Since we were going to be downtown, sashagee wanted to go to her old workplace, the Starbucks Roastery downtown. Since that was the first stop when we got off the bus, that's where we went first. sashagee walked in with Laila strapped to her chest and proceeded to blow a bunch of people's minds--most of her coworkers followed her on Instagram, but she had been sick for months and hadn't posted a lot during that time, so she explained her story a few times while I stood nearby, kept quiet, and looked around. Not being a coffee-drinker I had never been inside the Roastery (and apparently it only opened at the end of 2019? Lovely timing...) so I was surprised by how different it was from a standard Starbucks, with far more gleaming metal and light-colored wood than I was used it. We only saw the first floor but I got this tourist picture!:

Then we left to go to Hanabusa Cafe. I've always loved Hanabusa--and you can find plenty more posts like that if you search through my japanese food (和食) tag--and I was a bit worried that sashagee would think they were too fluffy or sweet or something, but that didn't happen. She loved it, and even loved the matcha sauce on my pancakes despite her hormone-altered tastebuds--though admittedly, the sauce is so sugary that there's almost no matcha bitterness in it. And she gets props for changing Laila in the restaurant bathroom, since Laila almost had an accident during the 40-minute-long wait to get our pancakes. Perfection cannot be hurried.

After Hanabusa we went to the Art Institute, though we didn't have a lot of time there since we had gotten a late start. sashagee really wanted to see the Obama Portraits so that was the first place we went, and then it only took about ten minutes because as a member I was able to skip the line and walk right in and I didn't realize that portraits was plural because there's only two of them! She loved them, though I have to admit I'm not a big fan of Barack's portrait--I don't like the way that he seems to be floating, unmoored against the backdrop of flowers. I did like the explanation of the painting's symbolism, though--how all the various flowers had meaning. Even if I'm not a fan of the result I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into it. I took her to check out the Thorne Miniature Rooms afterwards, but we only got through the American rooms before Laila got hungry and we had to go find the museum's "Infant Care" room to feed her. Once Laila was fed and clean, Sasha was thirsty and refused to drink from a drinking fountain, so we left to go find her something to drink elsewhere.

After a stop off at a Walgreens, we went back to the Roastery and stood in the long line for a few minutes until sashagee's coworkers answered her text and met her at the side entrance. They had told us they'd set aside some gelato for us, and I did get it, in a roundabout way--she ordered me a cold-brew malt, which I was initially pretty suspicious of but which I ended up mostly liking. I drank it while she chatted with her coworkers, showed Laila off, and made plans to text each other and then we went home!

It was a lovely day but Laila cried for an hour that night. I guess it was just too much excitement.

Friday was less packed but still fun. We got to wake up a little later, but around noon we packed Laila up and took the bus down to Lucy's on Broadway to meet lisakatevans for lunch! We had originally invited her to Hanabusa the previous day after worldbshiny couldn't come, but she couldn't make it because she was so busy. She couldn't make Friday either originally but changed her mind when she thought about how hard she had been working and how she hadn't seen us in a month. Lucy's--one of sashagee's favorite burger places--was lisakatevans's first suggestion, so we got burgers, fried pickles, and I got a strawberry milkshake with a shot of Fireball it in (surprisingly good) and we chatted for an hour and a half until lisakatevans had to return to work. She had just invited us to have cookies at her new home when she remembered, too. Another time!

That afternoon we just spent time with our daughter, but in the evening I went to services after over a year away:

Last Shabbat was the first Shabbat after Tisha b'Av and is called שבת נחמו Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Consolation, because we're supposed to feel some happiness after the low point of the Nine Days. It's a reference to the haftarah for that week:

Comfort ye, comfort ye My people,
Saith your God.
Bid Jerusalem take heart,
And proclaim unto her,
That her time of service is accomplished,
That her guilt is paid off;
That she hath received of the LORD’S hand
Double for all her sins.
Hark! one calleth:
‘Clear ye in the wilderness the way of the LORD,
Make plain in the desert
A highway for our God.
-Isaiah 40:1-3

And let me tell you, when I stepped off the bus and people were in the middle of singing לכה דודי Lecha Dodi...it was transcendent. It was a shorter service than normal, with no Torah reading, but I've missed it so much. I had to leave immediately after it was over to get back to my family, but I'll be going again.

Saturday we were going to go out to sashagee's parents' house to visit with her family and some family friends, but car trouble meant we couldn't go. She needed an oil change and brake repair, and that ended up taking until almost 3 p.m. even though she brought the car in right when the place opened at 8 a.m. So we spent Saturday resting, playing video games and cleaning and making dinner, and then on Sunday morning we got up early and drove out to the suburbs for lunch. sashagee's father made burgers and (all-beef) hotdogs and we chatted for a couple hours while Laila slept or got to meet some new people. Of course, they asked me quite a few questions about myself--the two most memorable moments are multiple people guessing I was either 30 or in my mid-20s (I am not) and talking about having lived in Japan, where one couple in their 60s mentioned taking a trip to Kyōto and visiting the Manga Museum and then getting into anime afterwards. It was so heartwarming that I didn't even mind much that they kept pronouncing it "mohn-jah."

The guests all left at about 2:30 p.m., so we watched a couple movies--I had completely forgotten about "Mysterious Fathoms Below" from The Little Mermaid--and then sashagee made the trip home once the heat of the day had faded enough for it to be safe.


It was a little rough on me--this used to be every weekend for me but it's been a long while since that was true--but it was a lot of fun! Next weekend will be lower-key, but I still do have a lot of vacation to use. Let's see what I can do with it before the Delta variant wreaks its vengeance upon us.