Cheap Date Night: Newborn Edition

This weekend was the Perseid Meteor shower. I thought it would be a nice little opportunity for a date night with Chuk. The vision was that we'd get the baby dressed in his jammies, all of us would load into the car and drive out to a field somewhere and then the baby would sleep in the car while Chuk and I laid out and looked at shooting stars.

Reality was a little different. On Saturday night we did all load into the car and drive away from the city, but we wound up in the parking lot of Mount Vernon, George Washington's home. The baby woke up and started crying when we turned off the car and the sky was completely cloudy and we couldn't see a single star, much less a shooting star. Major fail.

But we were determined. We headed out again on Sunday night. This time we ended up at a pullout on the side of the road near the Potomac River. (There were too many trees at the Mt. Vernon parking lot to go make it worth going back there again.) The baby stayed asleep so we pulled out our lawn chairs and our bag of trashy snacks and sat in front of the car looking up at the sky. (Sitting in lawn chairs on the side of the road in the middle of the night is exactly as classy as it sounds, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. We're city folk.) 

Instead of overcast skies, it was only partially cloudy...we could see maybe six stars at any given time. We craned our necks up to the sky, shielded our eyes from the headlights of oncoming traffic, passed the bag of chips back and forth, and talked. We had the deep, philosophical conversations that are usually reserved for late nights when you're in college or drinking too many cheap beers at the youth hostel or around a campfire. 

I saw one shooting star, but Chuk didn't see any. It didn't matter though. I think the takeaway is that we miss talking to each other about things that don't matter, because those are the things that draw us closer together, and that in order to make that happen, we need to leave the apartment and not be engaged with the baby. Right now, we don't have any childcare, but I'm okay with that. With a little creativity, we can still find a way to connect.