We went to hang out at the mall on a friday night.

Friday afternoon the Genius Husband calls me from work and says, “Ask my mother if she will watch the kids tonight so that we can go out for dinner.”

I’m a little bit shocked at this unexpected gesture and stutter something like, “UH….Okay, why?”

Brace yourself ladies, here is his not so romantic answer. “Because I want to like you right now, so I figured we could go out and talk for a while.”

The background to this conversation involved an earlier one we had been having about what happens to our relationship when I get pregnant. I get a little bit, some would say a lot, hormone crazy, and he starts to pack up and leave inside his head until the baby comes. We were debating whether I go crazy first, prompting him to want to leave, or if he gets emotionally distant first, prompting me to go crazy. It’s an unsettled argument, but I know that he likes me the least during my pregnancies. So he wants to like me, um, woohoo?

The Boy asked where we were going so I told him we were going on a date.

“What’s that?”

“A date is when mommy and daddy go out and do something together.”

“But why do you want to go on a date mom?”

“Because it’s fun.”

“I want to come.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a date boy.”

So we go out in search of a pleasant dining experience after leaving our kids with Beema.
Enter the strange southern California cultural observation. We end up at the mall. When I was a kid growing up in a hick oil/farm town in the Canadian Midwest the mall was where 13 year olds went to hang out on Friday for a date; not here. This mall had a giant stadium 12 movie theatre, outdoor restaurants and coffee shops surrounding the manicured courtyard with the little train you could pay for your kids to ride and pretty white lights on palm trees and people wearing dinner gowns and jackets and upscale restaurants and it almost makes you forget that you’re at a friggin mall. Sorry, promenade, because also unlike my experience as a prairie child, half of this mall is outdoors thanks to the climate and it therefore deserves a more fancy name.

Anyway, we found a Brazilian BBQ place. It was nice, with real fake stone interiors and waterfalls, and granite tile in the ladies room, and basically several steps up from the tin on the wall tacky décor of the pub style restaurant. There was a very funny and dark Brazilian guy entertaining us with Portuguese songs on his guitar, and occasionally, before the place filled up he would attempt an American song. I actually enjoyed his half assed rendition of California Dreamin’ in a very low key with a latin jazz style guitar accompaniment, but now I’m regressing to my music geek roots and I’ll return to the rest of the restaurant. The best part of this place, and heaven to my little pregnant belly, was the men in white shirts and bow ties bringing giant spits of slow cooked meat to our table every 10 minutes or so, and cutting off pieces for us to eat. They came for 2 hours until we said we were done. The happy little baby got so much protein, and I was stuffed, well, until we got home, then I needed a snack. And they had these little tiny cheese buns, that were more like dough wrapped around cheese, and man it would be easy to eat too many of those and hate yourself later.

We talked and enjoyed being together, and I even ate a little bit of tiramisu for dessert, I figured sugar would be safe after all of that protein.

And so, I have been on a date recently, one without even one squabble, or crying outburst, ot my husband rubbing his head head in total annoyance at my being so, um, female, or me feeling disappointed for having built it up too much, not one dark moment in the evening. How cool is that? And the kids were asleep by the time we got home.

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4 thoughts on “We went to hang out at the mall on a friday night.

  1. woohoo! A date! *really thrilled for you)
    A date? whats that? We cant ever find a sitter in a city where even MacDonalds is paying $15/hour. Thus no one bothers to babysit and only on the off chance that Pauls brother feels generous and is home can we drop off bennett for a date. *sigh*…the joys of having a beema nearby.

  2. icannot believe you are pregnant….i’ve not been on your blogspot for awhile.

    congratulations.

    love,

    trisha

  3. icannot believe you are pregnant….i've not been on your blogspot for awhile.

    congratulations.

    love,

    trisha

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