So after yesterday, actually during the day, we made the decision that we will have to take a day like yesterday for ourselves every month. My wife, as goes with teachers, has a certain amount of personal days that she can take off every year, and being the teacher that she is, rarely does. However, spreading 3 or 4 days out over the course of a school year won't make that big of a difference in her classes and instead of letting those personal days go to waste, she figures she might as well take them. So come May, we will have to see where we end up. But back to yesterday, it really was like we left our lives behind for a while and escaped everything. We didn't hear the news of the bomb blasts in Boston till the late afternoon and whenever my phone rang, which was only once during the whole day, I didn't even answer it. So we started our day, as I mentioned yesterday, with dropping our son off at daycare and then dropping my Jeep off to get fixed up. After that, we were off to the outlets to buy ourselves some new clothes with the plethora of gift certificates that we had saved up. All told, we bought a little over $200 worth of clothes and only spent $3 of our own money. That was a pretty good deal. We tried a few stores but ended up buying the bulk of our clothes at the Banana Republic outlet. I just didn't care for any of the other stores we walked into or the clothes they had. We did spend a good 2.5 hours at the outlets and it didn't even seem like it took that long. When I go shopping, I get serious about the clothes I buy, and sometimes it takes me a while. The biggest issue I had was with buying jeans. I found a style and color that I liked, but they didn't have my normal size that I have been buying for years 36/32. I searched and I searched and the size I wanted just wasn't there. They did, however, have a number of jeans in size 34/32, a smaller waist than I am used to, but since most of my clothes are a little big anyway, I figured I would try them on and see if they fit. To my very pleasant surprise, they fit with extra room to spare. I think the last time I wore pants that had a 34 inch waist was back in high school. So, I bought them. Those, and two polo shirts, and one T-shirt. That's all I needed and all I wanted.
Once we were finished up at the outlets, we had worked up an appetite and needed to make our decision on where to go for lunch. Luckily with the advent of the smart phone, all the information we needed was at our fingertips. As I mentioned yesterday, our initial plan was to go to Abbot's in either Noank or Niantic, one of those N towns. Unfortunately, they don't open until the first Friday in May so that left us with our second option, but not by any means less worthy of our patronage, and that was Bill's Seafood by the singing bridge in Westbrook. We got there right before the lunch rush, got a nice little table by windows overlooking the water, and got to deciding on what to eat. Well, we stocked up on seafood as we should have being at "Bill's Seafood". We didn't even order from the regular menu, everything we got was a "special". I got the New England Salmon chowder, which was fantastic, and my wife got the fried calamari with olives and jalapeno peppers. We ended up splitting both of them. Then came the main lunch course, with my wife getting the swordfish Reuben and myself getting the mixed seafood roll with lobster, clams, salmon, and shrimp. Everything was really tasty along with the few beers we had. Also while there, I ran into a gentleman I worked for up in Southbury. For those of you that don't know Connecticut, Southbury is probably a good hour and a half to two hours from Westbrook. He was simply with a friend grabbing food before heading out fishing. We exchanged pleasantries and him being a little younger, will probably end up hanging out in the future. Amazing how small this world really is. The more people I end up meeting and forging a relationship through work, the more people I run into randomly in my travels. In any case, lunch took us a little over an hour, and by the time we were done, decisions had to be made on what the rest of our day held for us. The two options left for us to choose from were to head out to Bluff Point or to head to Mystic to see the show that my wife got one of her ceramic pieces into. As Bluff Point will not be going anywhere anytime soon and the art show has a limited time being up, we decided to head to Mystic.
The show was pretty cool. There were a lot of really good works of art, including my wife's, and as is always the case, there were some that I didn't think should have gotten into the show. So we walked around, checked out the art work, and then had to start making our way home to pick up our son from daycare. Yesterday was the first day that both my wife and I picked up our son from daycare. I don't think he knew exactly what to do, but when we got there, he was playing a form of hide and seek with another boy and screaming his head off with joy as he likes to do from time to time. He saw both of us, and opposed to running away from one of us as he usually does, he came running over, ready to head home. Well, we had a few stops to make on the way home, one to our chiropractor which turned out to be a family affair with my mother and brother also being there at the same time. Then we had to go grab my Jeep. That was the toughest part for me. I got out of the car, went to go kiss our son goodbye as I didn't know if I would see him before he went to bed, and he started screaming. He looked incredibly said that I was leaving and the tears wouldn't stop streaming down his face. I hate that when it happens. But as things turned out, I did end up seeing him before he went to bed, which he didn't want to do at all. As soon as we started getting him ready for bed, the screaming started and it took both of us to change his diaper and get him into his pajamas for bed. He was squirming so much I don't think one of us alone would have been able to tackle the bedtime change. But, as soon as we were done, he calmed down. And, as has been the case for a long time now, my wife put him to bed, reading a story to him three times till he looked like he would fall asleep in her arms, and then after she placed him in his crib and left, he proceeded to babble to him self for another hour and half. All in all, it was a wonderful day. By the end, however, I was exhausted from all the driving. And yes, that exhaustion lingered into today with me getting out of bed 45 minutes late. Oh well.
No comments:
Post a Comment