Happy Hour...with Babies

I had never seen a bar with so many babies in it before.

We had gone to a bar/cafe on the beach in Goleta, meeting Tom, Laurel & Bri and some of their friends, one of whom brought Liam, who is close to Bri's age. I don't ever remember bringing a baby to bar before! But I looked around me and it seemed that every third table had families with babies. Of course this wasn't a bar per se, but a cafe with a bar in the middle.

I loved watching Tom in action, feeding Bri, cutting up bits of food for her to feed herself, grabbing her when she got too excited, wiping her face, etc., all the while keeping up a running conversation with Liam's Dad.

I also loved it that the moms were at one end of the table discussing diapers and baby sun screen and the dads were at the other discussing babies' eating and sleeping habits. This is the group that used to party quite a lot, pre-baby days. Obviously the partying hasn't stopped, just the focus has changed!

We are here in "our" apartment at Maravilla. The idea had been to stay here in one of the two available apartments in the Maravilla complex, which would give us the opportunity to visit Alice and have breakfast with her each morning. Walt's brother and his wife rented the other apartment that is available. Our apartment is lovely.

We have a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath, a bigger place than Alice's assisted living facility. But there is no internet access...not even a telephone. I was excited about visiting the main building's internet center, which has about 6-8 computers for use by the residents. However, the internet access is slow as molasses. I was finally able to connect to Funny the World's main page, but it took so long to download the photos in yesterday's entry that I knew there was no way I could upload an entry with photos. I will have to post this entry when I can get to Tom's and use his wifi.

Alice kind of confused things by having to be hospitalized with what they thought could be one of a number of things, the worst of which would be colon cancer, but it turned out that it was constipation (the nurse must have told us six times that she passed two baseball size stools after her prep!). Still, it required her to be hospitalized for a day, undergo the prep and sigmoidoscopy, and then spend another night in the hospital.

She has a lovely room, but of course can't see the view (because she's blind) and slept all day anyway. Walt and I sat in her room for five hours waiting to see the doctor (who never came). I did finish one book and half of another, though! It was only 10 minutes before we left to join Tom & Laurel for dinner that I realized that I had wifi in the hospital the whole time!

We sat for part of the time in the waiting room in the area where they were doing her sigmoidoscopy. They ended up taking her back to her room without letting us know they were doing it, so we had to wander around the hospital ourselves trying to get through the maze. In the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), all the walls on all the halls were covered with tiles of hand prints.

The guard who questioned us about why we were there without any pass for that area told me that these were handprints of all the babies who had been healthy enough to leave the NICU.

We were told the doctor would be in between 8 and 9, so Walt and I rushed back to be at the hospital at 7:45. His brother and his wife arrived around 8:30. At 9, the nurse told us the doctor and come and gone and had left notes on Alice's chart, but nobody apparently ever saw him.

They are going to release her tomorrow morning, which means we have to get her and bring her back here and get her settled in her apartment again before we go off to the wedding. Should make for an interesting day!

The best thing about today was that I called the Yolo County Courthouse to find out about my jury summons and discovered that I do not have to show up on Monday, which means I don't have to drive home alone on Sunday and can drive home with Walt on Monday. I'm all for doing my civic duty...but it's also nice not to have to too!