Birthday season

Today is the anniversary of the day Ruby was due! As almost all of Ruby's friends are the exact same age, we are now in the middle of full-blown birthday season. Ruby's playgroups have decided to organize joint first birthday parties to avoid massive scheduling conflicts and general birthday party burnout. We attended the birthday party for our working moms playgroup a couple of weeks ago. It was beautifully sunny day in the park.



Most of the babies in this group are a little older than Ruby, and many of them were full-on walking on their own. Ruby wanted to join in, but needed quite a bit of assistance.



Being working moms, all of the moms in the group are pretty busy, so we only have meetings every other week, and they're usually not very well-attended. This may have been the first time we got almost all of the babies together at one time!



Not to be excluded from the baby birthday season is Steve, who turned 29 earlier this week. I knew that what Steve had been wanting for a long time was for us to go out for a nice dinner just the two of us, something we have not done since our trip to Hawaii 6 months ago. Back then Ruby was going through major separation anxiety in the evenings, so our dinner dates were sort of plagued with the guilt that the baby was crying for us to come home. Since then, her separation anxiety first got even worse, and then in the last few weeks got much better. I decided to surprise Steve with a date night complete with a sitter for his birthday. Our nanny agreed to stay into the evening to look after Ruby, and this time she was totally fine while we were gone. Steve and I went to Fleur de Lys, which we have not been to since we first moved into the city five years ago.



The food was fantastic, and the best part was that we met Hubert Keller!

Somehow everyone at the restaurant, including Hubert knew it was Steve's birthday, so he got a birthday wish from the master chef himself!