Giraffes in Hats

My mom’s surgery was postponed.

This is potentially good news. It’s good news because the fluid around her lung appears to be improving.

But it’s also frustrating. It’s frustrating because when the surgeon started to do the procedure, he realized it was going to be riskier and more complicated than he thought. Something about my mom’s anatomy. So with the improvement seen on the X-ray, he spoke to my dad and suggested we wait to see if the drainage tube continues to (finally? maybe?) do the trick.

I hope this is the first sign of light at the end of tunnel. Because this has been an emotional roller coaster and my mom has been through enough already.

I’m scared shitless about my mom’s surgery tomorrow.

My mom is in the hospital with pneumonia. It’s serious. Her right lung is so compressed by fluid that the doctors can’t even hear any respiratory sounds on that side of her chest. She already had one surgical procedure to insert a drainage tube — through her back, into her chest — which doesn’t seem to be working. The next step is more invasive surgery to remove the fluid.

She’s in a lot of pain. Breathing is excruciating.

My dad told me not to fly home. But being so far away … I’m just going through life in a daze.

They were supposed to come visit us for Thanksgiving. But now I’m just hoping she’s out of the hospital by then.

Jason and I spent the weekend tooling around the Nashville suburbs. As expected, I was enchanted by porch swings and big backyards and little kids riding tricycles and he … has been having some kind of early onset mid-life crisis about becoming an adult. 

He lamented about losing his “edge” (ha!) and bemoaned the “vast sameness” of planned subdivisions and strip malls. I, on the other hand, tried to reassure him that moving to the suburbs would not be the huge mental shift it would be if we moved from, say, the Upper East Side to the Five Towns on Long Island. For two reasons.

1) We already drive everywhere. 
2) We don’t drive that far.

We had a car in New York but we hardly ever used it. Because walking meant we were doing stuff. We could grab an egg and cheese on a roll for a lazy breakfast, meander around Central Park and watch Hula Hoop Man demonstrate that the trick is “front to back, front to back,” and then hop on the train to have drinks with our friends without worrying about how we’d get home.

But now we’ve become a two-car family. And while it’s nice to be able to run some errands on foot, we still use at least one car more days than not. 

But it’s not like we need to drive that far to get to the things we want to get to. It’s easy to drive here. And we will do stuff simply because we like to. If I have to drive five minutes to a park to go running instead of opening my front door and sprinting out … so be it. 

On Sunday we even went to some open houses. I think our home search would make a great episode of House Hunters: She doesn’t want to be anywhere near a college student or a bar with an outdoor patio. He doesn’t want to have to drive everyday or commute more than 15 minutes. Will they be able to find something for both of them or will their incompatible demands force them to flee the Nashville area entirely???

I think Suzanne Whang just said it all. 

This is strictly confidential.

But Jason might get a job offer here in Nashville.

There’s nothing officially on the table, but his current boss made overtures about wanting him to stay on full-time next year.

In a lot of ways, it would be a dream job for him. It’s exactly what he wants to do, at a prestigious institution and with sane hours (perhaps with less financial upside, but I’ve always told him that I’d rather see him more than have more money.)

Before we sign any papers (and, granted, we’re still quite a ways from that), Jason asked me to think long and hard about staying here.

I already have three concerns.

1) My career. I’m not sure what I’d do if we stayed. I could potentially keep my current position — even though my boss thinks I’m moving back in July — but it would definitely waylay any hope of a promotion. Plus, working from home is boring. But I haven’t exactly been overwhelmed by the job opportunities available in my field down here either.  

2) No friends. We have no friends! We don’t know a single couple to go out and do things with. I suppose that could change but I miss my own friends so much sometimes. And all my efforts to make friends so far have been a giant flop (more on that later).

3) Festivals. “Festivals” being the code word I use with Jason when I’m not sure I like a place. And I’m not sure I like it here. It’s a fun city, but it’s a young city. All the cool stuff to do is for 23-year-olds without kids. And I’m not sure about the suburbs either. The suburbs here are what passes for rural in New York. There are no sidewalks, no cute little town squares with yoga studios and boutiques and organic grocery stores. You have to drive to go to the park. Plus. Plus! The airport sucks. I mean, it’s a nice enough airport but they have those stupid new X-ray scanners, and the food choices are terrible and you can’t fly internationally without connecting somewhere.

So I don’t know.

By the same token, I’m not sure where else I want to go (cough, California, cough).  Back to New York?  The West Coast?  DC?  And how realistic are those places?

So Jason is right. We’ve got a lot of thinking to do.

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Of course, my excitement about maybe, potentially knowing where we’ll be next year — and the possibility of buying our first house — has me scouring Trulia and Zillow to see where we might live.  So that’s kind of cool, if a little cart-before-horse.

Oh, so it’s Halloween.

I took Lydia to Party City last week to rummage through the three costumes they still had left in the 0-6 month size. 

Then we found out that they’re banning Halloween at her daycare because of the “scary nature of the holiday.”

Lame.

Anyway, she’s going to be a monkey later.

This one:

(Being modeled by the saddest baby to ever wear a monkey costume)

I’m not sure what we’re actually going to do this afternoon though. Clearly she’s too young for Trick Or Treating. In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out how to use her as bait to get candy for myself.

We went to Memphis this weekend.

When we moved to Nashville, Jason promised me lots of road trips. I’d been itching to get out of town, so Saturday afternoon we packed up the car and headed west.

It was perfect. Obviously it was nowhere near the scale of our last pre-baby trip (Tokyo! Kyoto! Kobe!) but I needed a break from the New York to Nashville corridor. I wanted to be on vacation. Something a little touristy.

We made it to Memphis in a three-hour drive, and our first stop was Pearl Oyster House for provisions. Sweet tea, a dozen Gulf oysters, crab-stuffed shrimp and rice. Just what I was craving.

Then Jason suggested we go to Graceland. It was supposed to be a little ironic on our part, but after we paid $80 (seriously, eighty. dollars) for parking and admission, we just had to embrace it in all its glory. There’s nothing ironic about spending $80 for admission to a tourist attraction, perhaps the most expensive tourist attraction we’ve been to on three continents.

Afterward we headed over to the Peabody Hotel to watch the famed Peabody ducks … do something. Go up an elevator, I guess. It was hard to tell from the crowd of people who rushed the red carpet for a glimpse of these minor celebrities who literally did their trick in 30 seconds. (I was also less than impressed to hear that they replace the ducks every three months. I mean, what’s so special about going up an elevator if any duck can do it?) Luckily Jason and I thought ahead and parked ourselves in the Lobby Bar to order cocktails. He had an old-fashioned and I went for the mint julep. I couldn’t resist.

Dinner was unironic and untouristy at Automatic Slim’s, which was tasty and wonderful.

We decided Beale Street wasn’t for us (we did have a baby in tow, after all), so after dinner we headed back to the Lobby Bar at the Peabody to have a liquid dessert (and some German chocolate cake) while we watched people stream in for a black tie costume party that was happening on the mezzanine above us. 

Then thoroughly buzzed at 8:30, we finally made our way back to our own hotel where I was excited to get a good night’s sleep. Except that Liddy — beyond over-tired and confused at this point — woke up every hour or so screaming her head off. She didn’t seem to enjoy her first night in a hotel.

So Sunday morning was a little painful. But we continued on our plan to drive through the city (taking a brief detour across the river in Arkansas! ARKANSAS!) before meeting up for an early lunch with Jason’s fifth- or sixth- or whatever-removed cousins at Corky’s BBQ.

I guess this means our first post-baby trip — where we didn’t have our parents to help us out — was a success. The next cities on our list are Birmingham and Louisville, and now I remember why we were so excited to leave New York in the first place. To be completely out of our element for awhile. For an adventure.

It’s Magic Skinny Potion.  Really.  

Despite eating 2000 calories a day (sometimes more!) I am now four pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight, hovering near the weight I was at my wedding (a weight I had to starve myself to achieve — don’t judge. My dress was backless), and wearing a pair of jeans I haven’t been able to fit into since 2009.

I want to shout this from the rooftops.