Carson, on the other hand, can be quite the dandy! On one of her “we just have to go check out this sale” outings with the neighborhood gals, Julie picked up an outfit for Carson for something like $12 (or so she said; better for the marriage if I don’t check receipts).

The stars aligned last Friday night: Benton had a birthday party to attend, so Julie and Carson decided to make it a “fancy” date night for the two of them. Carson was excited:

Alana and I headed out for our own date night, but with much more casual attire (every article of clothing she wore wound up with some amount of chocolate cake smeared on it).

The “Fancy” Couple:

Last night, we headed to downtown Columbus to an area called The Short North. Last night was the first Saturday of the month, which is the monthly Gallery Hop event — or the Holiday Hop due to the season. In Austin terms, the area/event has a Sixth Street feel with South Congress-like galleries in place of music venues. Julie picked up a World AIDS day ribbon, and we both signed a petition to get Barack Obama on the ballot in Ohio (no guarantees that he’ll get our vote in the primary, but he ought to at least have the requisite signatures to get on the ballot!). We had drinks and an appetizer at one restaurant, then did some more gallery/shop-hopping. Julie was quite chatty — striking up conversations with the staff in at least half of the places we stopped!

The most interesting conversation we had was with Paul Palnik. He is a cartoonist/satirist who does elaborate, poster-sized comic-like pieces. Many of them are heavy on words. Many have a ton of cartoon people. And many have both. Palnik is a lifelong cartoonist who, he said, actually taught art at several universities but gave that up because simply being an artist was more lucrative and that’s what he really loves to do. The pieces were fun, in that you literally could stand in front of them for an hour taking in all the details and chuckling here and there. The music playing in the gallery was a CD of Palnik’s son, Elijah Aaron, who is finishing up at the Berklee College of Music. We bought his CD and, I suspect, will be buying a piece or two of Palnik’s work down the road.

Over dinner — our favorite “dinner composed of a couple of appetizers with a shared light main dish” — we wound up kicking around some of our “relationship anecdotes,” including a story that I’ve told to many, many people over the years…but never to Julie, I realized. And, it’s about Julie. That may be a subject for another post, but I’ll need to get clearance from the main subject before that happens!

Stay tuned!

Alana was long overdue for having her fingers and toes redone. “I want BLUE!” Blue was the $2 bottle we bought when we also bought purple several weeks ago. It turns out…$2 buys you approximately 2 hours on the fingers of an active 2-year-old. It was good and dry by the time she was released from Dad’s Nail Parlor (aka the family room sofa), but it started flaking off almost immediately.

Tonight was our second attempt at a date night since we hit Ohio. You may recall that the sitter was a no-show last time. This time, the designated sitter was the same sitter who is tapped to watch the kids when I’m in Austin and Julie has some kid-related appointment or other next week. By the time she got the full run-down on where band-aids, neosporin, diapers, PJs, and everything else is located, we didn’t leave until 45 minutes after she arrived.

Back up a little bit.

Julie woke up this morning saying it really hurt for her to swallow. Her throat is red, but she doesn’t seem to have a fever or an upset stomach. We’d hoped the throat would improve as the day went on, but it did not.

I suggested canceling the date night. Julie’s logic: “It’s either going to get better or it’s going to get worse. If it gets better, then we’d kick ourselves for canceling. If it gets worse, well, then I might as well enjoy myself before then.”

We went to a nice restaurant called Jason’s in Dublin’s Old Town. We ordered semi-exotic martinis. I made a brief, yet witty toast. We sipped our drinks.

I watched my true love twist her face into a dramatic and pained grimace as she swallowed.

How romantic.

Despite her throat woes, the meal was excellent. Afterwards, we went for a little walk, and then hit Barnes and Noble to do some book browsing.

Julie’s now doing a little doctor research. Our hope is that the nighttime medication she picked up will knock her out for the night, but we’re bracing ourselves for an ugly week ahead.

Stay tuned…

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.