Wait, back up a bit. I forgot to mention the part where we went to the Oregon Country Fair and Gwen got heatstroke and we had to cut our trip to the coast short because she was running a fever of 101.9 and su-u-u-u-u-per fussy and cranky all night and all the way home. I guess I'll just have to write another post about that.
This is a happy post about James's birthday.
So, we woke up to a happy little girl and decided to drive over to Bob's Red Mill for some breakfast. We'd never been, but Mom said it was a good spread (with lots of gluten-free options), so we figured we'd try it out. Well, we happened to leave the house at five minutes to 8 am, which only struck us as a bad idea when we hit the highway. We never deal with morning traffic on a regular basis, so it caught us off guard. In any case, we managed to get to the other side of town with minimal delay and minimal fussing on Gwen's part (it helped that I was sitting in the back - I think the previous day's marathon car ride gave her a little PTSD). As we approached the mill, we noticed a nearby office building expelling its contents of employees in a random fire drill.
Weird.
Anyway, we got to the restaurant before any of them decided to utilize this delay in productivity to grab a late breakfast as we were soon settled at a table on the balcony awaiting our stone-ground goodies (or so the kitchy propaganda on the walls informed us was the case). I got a belgian waffle, fruit cup, and garden sausage. James ordered french toast and turkey bacon. Gwen got mashed up bites of my fruit cup and Mommy Milk. Everyone left the table satisfied. Except Gwen, who wanted more fruit, but she soon got over it.
We went back home and everyone took a two hour nap.
Seriously, I'm not kidding. It was awesome.
Then we all woke up at noon and Gwen got a bath and James and I got showered, did some laundry, and just chilled. We folded laundry, watched some episodes of Breaking Bad that Netflix had delivered, Gwen took another two hour nap, we had a minor first-parent-freak-out when her fever came back up to 100.3 (it'll make more sense when I've written the other post about the heatstroke), but then she cooled back down and never did get fussy this time, so all in all, it was ok.
James asked me what I wanted to do for dinner and I said, "How about sushi?" and he replied, "I was just thinking sushi!"
Ah, great minds . . . and minds attached to bellies that had such a heavy breakfast that they had skipped lunch. Turkey bacon and garden sausage notwithstanding.
We thought it would be fun to try out James's new birthday present: a Burley d'Lite bike trailer. So James hooked it up and off we went. We figured we'd only go for a short ride because a) Gwen might freak out, b) Gwen didn't have a helmet (although not necessary in the cage of the trailer, and she's still a bit too small for one), and c) it was getting late. So we rode to the sushi place and Gwen was such a champ - she had a blast! That's my little adventure girl! We locked up our bikes and took her into the restaurant. As we didn't have the car seat this time, we put her in a little booster seat and asked them if they had a little rice she could snack on. They gave us two rice balls about the size for two nigirizushi minus the raw fish on top.
Sticky rice really lives up to it's name. She had a blast and by the end, even though she probably got 90% in her mouth, the 10% spread all over the table, bench, wall, booster seat, and baby was impressive.
Yes, we are now Those Parents. The ones who bring their 7-month-old baby to a sushi restaurant and let her shriek and smear rice all over the place. At least I tried to clean up the worst of it before we left. I hope James left a nice tip.
After a brief stop at Old Navy for new shorts for me (all last year's shorts are now too big - please don't hate me) and a ride home rounded out the day wonderfully. Gwen went to sleep and James and I folded more laundry. Then we assembled the Legos that Gwen got her Dada for his birthday.
Now, time for bed. Happy birthday, pooka-love.
