6.01.2007

 

Last weekend

So I said I'd blog about our visitors from this past weekend, and it took my looking at Jack's blog to remember that I hadn't done it yet. Whoops.

On Friday, I picked up Lauren and Steve at the BR airport, then we swung by Jack's office to show them around since it was on the way home. We had some yummy broccoli pasta stuff, salad, and bread for dinner and previously-made minty brownies for dessert. We also attempted to watch a movie that we had recorded (The Insider), but the audio was so screwy that we had it turned all the way up and still couldn't hear the dialogue. Bummer. We'll have to track down a DVD of it at some point and watch the rest, because it looked really interesting once we started watching it.

On Saturday morning, we slept in (well, the people who aren't pregnant slept in) and then headed to the downtown farmer's market to wander around. Lauren wanted to get some veggies for baby shower food (and, as I promised her, she found some awesome ripe tomatoes), and we also found some good bread, hummus, and other goodies. I love our farmer's market — it's low-key and is mostly a bunch of people selling stuff out of the backs of their trucks, and I love the free samples! After we marketed for a while, we took them to Louie's Cafe for lunch, a classic greasy-spoon diner on campus with an eccentric short-order cook. They have awesome burgers, breakfast stuff, and salads, and they have several vegetarian things that Jack likes, so it's one of our favorite places to take out-of-towners. I've also heard that it's a popular place to go for pancakes when all the bars close, though not being a bar-hopper, I've never experienced this particular aspect of Louie's myself. We then headed to a cluster of neat shops near downtown, where Jack and I found a really cool blue and green metal lizard to hang on Kent's wall. I'm totally loving our animal motif in there, and we're definitely stretching it beyond regular elephants and lions. =)

The afternoon was taken up by naps and sitting around reading (Steve seemed to enjoy perusing our baby books and magazines all weekend), and then we did enchiladas for dinner and rewatched the Lost season finale. We all love the show, but in different ways: Lauren and Jack love reading about it online and speculating wildly about what will happen next, though Steve and I prefer to let the show's creators surprise us since I think we both realize that we can't predict what's going to happen anyway. It's a crazy show! Anyway, it was fun to see the finale again, and it helped pass the time while we waited for Mom and her fiancé, Bill, to arrive at the NOLA airport and then drive to our house. They got to our house around 11 something, visited for a little while, and then headed off to their hotel so that we could all sleep!

We took Mom and Bill to church and then lunch at a cool local bar/grill place that has really yummy Sunday brunch, while Lauren and Steve got together with Jennifer for shower preparations. After brunch, all the planners decided to do their various jobs to bring the shower together, and Jack and I snuck away for much-needed naptime before the shower. I had been sleeping pretty poorly the past couple of days, waking up for several hours at a time and then having trouble falling back to sleep, so a nap was in order so that I could regain my perky, loveable personality to celebrate the baby with our friends. The shower was great — Jack and I felt very loved and supported by everyone, even the people who weren't able to come all the way to the swamplands to celebrate with us.

We grilled Asian stuff, plus pineapple and plums for dessert, on Sunday night, though grilling took longer than we had thought it would and we ended up eating pretty late. Jack's such a good grillmaster, even when one of the propane tanks runs out and he has to figure out how to rehook everything up in the middle of cooking. It was still nice to have everybody around the table, and hanging out at home gave us a chance to get to know Bill a little better as well, which was great! We also got everyone to try Abita, our favorite local beer. Yum.

On Monday, we had a lazy breakfast of pancakes and bacon, and then Mom and Lauren helped me sort the baby loot into clothing, feeding, and various other piles. I've done quite a bit of laundry in the past few days so that everything is clean and ready for my kid, including the onesies and pants and tiny socks and also all of his sheets and towels. It's crazy to imagine that this wiggly entity inside of me is going to be wearing socks and onesies soon.

We shuffled Lauren and Steve off to the airport in the afternoon, and then Mom, Bill, Jack and I headed to NOLA to meet up with one of Bill's aunts and then eat at Commander's Palace, a very swanky and well-known restaurant in the Garden District that Bill has been wanting to try for some time. His aunt grew up in NOLA, moved away for school, marriage, and raising her family, and then came back in the 80s (I think) and has been living there ever since. She was really neat to talk to, because in addition to being a witty conversationalist, she's an art historian and has traveled all over the world. She told us we had to stop by if we were ever in NOLA again, so whenever we end up going back (probably at Mardi Gras if not before), we'll swing by and say hi. Dinner was sooo good, but I was presented with a large head-on shrimp on top of the piece of fish I ordered, so I calmly removed its head and tried my best not to alarm my vegetarian husband.

I'm pretty sure I fell asleep in the car on the way home, and we left Mom and Bill at their hotel and said goodbye since they had to leave at first light to get to the rental car place and then the airport on time. Happy sighs have been had all week as I think about how wonderful it was to see everyone. We'll have many out-of-towners once the baby comes, since he's quite a draw, and I'm really looking forward to those visits! We make it to NC, VA, and PA a few times a year to see friends and family, but it's cool when people can make the trip here and see us in our element.

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Comments:

heh, heh. The NOLA shrimp experience. We always loved to see the looks on our out-of-town friends' facesh when they had a full shrimp experience. hhaha
 
Great recap! We had such a good weekend visiting and relaxing. Thanks again! I may become inspired to re-create the Louie's veggie omelet, though I don't know if I can fit 10 veggies in. I'll report back if I manage. :-)
 
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