Babysitters and Burns' Supper

Living so far from family can make getting a break from the baby pretty difficult. We've been taking turns staying in with Forest while the other has a chance to get out and socialize, but we have been missing getting out as a couple. Not that we need breaks from our little angel, but in our 8 childless years, we got quite accustomed to date nights and are determined to continue our romantic relationship despite becoming parents. This means we have to recruit friends and baby-sitters to watch the little man so that we can go out on the town. 

Last Friday was Jonathan’s company’s annual Burns’ Supper festivities and we were determined to go. We got a great babysitter referral from some trusted friends and decided to bite the bullet. I wrote out a novel of directions for how to care for our 3 month baby, which I’m sure was quite patronizing to her with her wealth of experience, but she was a very good sport about it. So we left her to put our love child to sleep while we dressed in our finest and headed out to enjoy a Scottish cultural experience. 

Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns is a well-known and quite worshipped poet from these parts and every year, all around Scotland, people gather to celebrate his work with traditional Scottish cuisine and Ceilidh (pronounced Kay-Lee) dancing. 

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Yummy Haggis!

The sticky toffee pudding stole the show.

I was super excited to see my man dressed up in the traditional Scottish garb. 

I just think men look so handsome in kilts and wish he could pull this look off in the States.  I thought of custom ordering him a kilt in his family’s tartan but they are crazy expensive and I just can’t see him wearing one to a formal occasion stateside. He did say that the outfit was surprisingly warm and during the dancing part of the evening he got quite overheated. 

I was most excited about the Ceilidh dancing which is like the Scottish version of square dancing. It was super complicated and fast-paced and my baby brain in addition to the two glasses of champagne I had made it almost impossible to follow. 

Luckily my friend Diane was super sharp and would whisper directions to me as we went along. It brought me back to my 4-year old tap dancing days where I would just look at the girl next to me and copy whatever she did rather than learning the steps. (Yea, I was way better at soccer and softball than dancing!) It was also quite a work out for this out-of-shape momma. Here is some footage of Ceilidh from YouTube to give you an idea.

We had a great time, but we’ve definitely lost some stamina. At about 10:30 PM when everyone else was gearing up for a long night of partying, Jonathan and I were trying to stifle yawns. 

We knew little man was likely to wake up pretty early, so we ducked out around 11 pm in order to capitalize on sleep. The sitter swears Forest was an angel, and I believe her because we didn’t hear a peep out of him until 7:45 AM! He had mercy on his poor partying parents. I’d call it a successful outing, and it also got us over our fear of leaving Forest with a sitter which I think is important when you don’t have family nearby to recruit for these occasions.