signs you have a baby

as mentioned below, our anniversary was on thursday, the last night of judah's sleep routine reestablishment journey. so we came home from our date at 7pm to give the little guy his bath and put him down. we celebrated the rest of the occasion at home.

it's pretty funny how much changes when you have a kid. the whole notion of romance really just changes into "hurry up...what the hell can we get accomplished before he wakes up/gets hungry/messes himself?" if we didnt have judah, this year's anniversary probably would have been spent on a trip to some exotic locale rather than in east bumbly where we live. i would have spent 2 hours getting ready rather than zero. i would have had time to pick out just the right outfit, candles, meal, and music. i would have had every detail of our date planned flawlessly. the whole thing would have been photoshoot-ready. it would have looked so perfect in pictures, but probably would have made us both miserable trying to make it that way.
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here are some sights from our actual evening that you'll probably never see gracing the pages of a magazine or up on the big screen. these snapshots never fit into my picture of romance at all...until this year. none of these pictures are staged. this is the actual detritus from our evening.

this is our ersatz jacuzzi, the bathtub that i didn't even have time to clean, adorned with this month's shape magazine and a worn down ikea candle. these are the toasting glasses from our wedding day. they sit on our mantle gathering dust the rest of the year. rather than washing them, we just rinsed them in bath water before drinking out of them. SEXY

we popped the cork on some yummy champagne that my mom gave us and it landed next to a parenting magazine that sits near the toilet. HOT!

said bottle of champagne next to a bottle of dry scalp control conditioner. who says the magic is gone? bow chick wow wow.

and the piece-de-resistance, the foil cap of the champagne softly illuminated by our non toxic flea trap that only seems to catch ants that we didn't even know we had rather that the fleas that our evil cats introduced to our house. that 7 watt bug-catching bulb really cast a romantic glow on our faces that night.

honestly, we had the best time together this year of any other time on our anniversary. we hung out in our hillbilly hot tub and sat for a long time on our back porch enjoying the beautiful fall night, and each others' company while reliving memories of our last 5.5 years of dating, 3 years of marriage and 4 months of parenting together.

i am learning that the less i try to make our life resemble the perfect scenes from a movie and just let it be OURS, the more real and magical it becomes.