When you’re an adult, birthdays that fall mid-week feel like Ted telling JD it’s his birthday:
Category: Memoir (Page 1 of 23)
When’s the last time you’ve been lost? Really, truly lost?
I’ve always been prone to getting lost. To this day I have no sense of direction.
Back when I learned how to drive, we relied on maps. We had to.
My parents and grandparents always had maps laying around – AAA maps and giant Rand McNally maps that unfolded into a million squares and were impossible to put back together.
Eventually the internet brought us Mapquest. You could simply type in two destinations and it would give you a route. My generation’s car floors were carpeted with Taco Bell and Mapquest directions.
Sometimes the instructions were wrong or you missed a step.
Boom, you were lost!
When I was a new driver, I got lost on the way home from a friend’s house. They thought it was funny when I called them crying asking, “WHERE AM I?!”
Without smart phones, a common thing to do when you got lost was pull into a gas station and ask for help. I haven’t had to do this for decades.
Smartphones were the best thing to ever happen to me.
I haven’t been lost since. Well, until last week.
I haven’t posted for a while and, the reason is really quite simple.
The baby isn’t sleeping.
Ok, so the baby is technically sleeping, but not well. And we’re dying.
Six months of shitty nights of broken-up sleep has taken a toll. Surely, by now we thought he’d be closer to sleeping through the night but we were wrong.
Surely, when he’s over his cold he’ll sleep better.
Nope. Ok, well surely when he learns how to roll he’ll sleep better.
Nope.
SURELY when he starts eating solids he’ll start sleeping better. LOLOLOLMAO NOPE.
The nicest thing you can do for yourself is eat a bowl of pho by yourself, very slowly.
My due date had come and gone. This was my last opportunity to enjoy a meal out, while I had one child.
They scheduled the induction that morning. Baby was over a week past his due date and seemed in no hurry to leave – peacefully floating in a sea of hazy amniotic fluid, snuggling his umbilical cord and snoozing away.
I ate lunch nearby at Pho Mai in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota.
This was a month of reunions.
Two to be exact. But significant, nonetheless.
One was anticipated with great joy and the other, well, a surprise.
My friend Beth wrote about her great Iowa reunion tour. We shared two years of the Iowa chapter.
Beth and her husband tried to visit Minnesota earlier, but their plans got foiled by pandemic chaos.
Finally the stars aligned. Last month, their flights to MPS went smoothly, no one got sick. Suddenly we were heading to their hotel in Bloomington to meet.
