Playing hooky

With Caleb’s bedtime around 7:00 PM, it simply isn’t worth it to pay a babysitter the going rate of $12 - $15/hour to sit on our couch and watch TV so that Colin and I can wolf down a dinner and a fall asleep at the movie theater. We can do that at home. (A digression: I was paid $2/hour to babysit in the mid-90s, and my inflation calculator tells me that wage should have risen to about $3.25/hour in today’s dollars. So, I resent it on those grounds as well.)

So, we’ve hit on the idea of a day-te. (Similar to the frugality inspired stayte of prior posts.) We’re paying for daycare during the day anyway, so why not move our nighttime tryst several hours early and have a daytime date?

We waited for the weather to predict a warm, dry, sunny day and then I took a day off work. After dropping Caleb at daycare we were free!! We felt liberated, sneaky and a bit giddy all at the same time to be wearing flip flops and bathing suits amid the suits and cell phones and to have a full free day ahead of us without fretting over nap times, planning meals and packing diapers.

Our first stop was a leisurely breakfast at a local crepe place where we luxuriated in slowly drinking gourmet coffee and talking about life like a new couple.

Then we were off to legendary Walden Pond where we parked ourselves in a secluded woody spot at the edge of the pond, just steps from the original site of Thoreau’s cabin. Hard to imagine a more relaxing spot than the one that inspired the whole of transcendentalism.

Perhaps in effort to feel like we somehow deserved this scene, we both went for brisk trail runs, got nice and sweaty, and took intensely refreshing dips in the pond. We paddled out in the middle of the water and wrapped our arms around each other, taking in the blue sky and rolling tree-line backdrop – creating exactly the scene I was imagining when I first conceived this day-te.

Back to our little cove, we dried off in the sun while reading. I can’t overextoll the pleasure of reading a book you enjoy in an environment of your choosing for as long as you want with no threat of interruption. You only truly appreciate this gift when it becomes so improbable; and I drunk it in with a Nick Hornby book, How to Be Good, that is funny, engaging and unexpectedly thought-provoking – the very definition of a good beach… um pond read. We were periodically joined by other daytime pond revellers who all seemed to be retired and inordinately happy.

One of these fellow pond-goers tipped us off to a nearby farm that sells fresh produce, homemade pies and sandwiches. So, we ended our date with a picnic overlooking fields of flowers and vegetables and munching on a baked creation called a “magic bar.” A fitting ending to a pretty magical day.