Anniversary

It was our third anniversary this weekend. Actually, it was on June 3, but how much less fun is it to celebrate your marriage on a Wednesday? Anniversaries should be like Thanksgiving or Easter, where the day of the week trumps any specific date. Our anniversary, we've decided, is the first Saturday in June. On this particular first Saturday in June, Melissa and Bill were visiting and graciously offered to take Jack for the entire day so we could go do something fun. They didn't have to offer twice! We made reservations at a spa in Palo Alto and planned a picnic and wine tasting at a winery called Ridge, way up above Steven's Creek reservoir overlooking the whole valley. We kind of stole both these ideas from our friends Nick and Libby, who have always talked these places up, which was kind of an odd theme for the day, but we figured they have a happy marriage so it can't hurt. It didn't, in fact.

Ridge was first, and after we'd tasted half a dozen delicious reds (and as the first customers in the room, received special attention and were snuck a taste of a $150 bottle of wine that we obviously weren't going to buy), we chose one for our picnic and sat out in their sweet little garden looking out over the rolling California hills. We also joined their wine club because they have first Fridays every month with a free tasting and an option (but not requirement) to buy those wines (at a discount), and that sounded fun. We belonged to a wine club before I got pregnant and went on my nine month wine hiatus, and it was almost like a monthly enforced date night. Which, for a couple that's been married three or less years, should not be hard to come by, but surprisingly is. Danny left his business card (maybe they want stone-fruit to pair at their tasting) and took their tasting notes, to show to Farmer Al as an example of what they could be doing at Frog Hollow. I was tickled by the tasting notes myself because instead of talking about bouquets and overtones that you probably will only pretend to smell or taste, they focused on the weather, the soils, the spot the vines occupied on the hillside, the whole environment and how it contributed to the sugars or the tannins in the wine. It's the ecologist's wine! They weren't doing it in the fruity biodynamics way that has suddenly gotten so trendy, but in the way that growers who have been on the same land for centuries and have an almost leopoldian intimacy with it do. Enough about that- this day was about us! Over lunch, we engaged in a heated debate about industrial organics and the price of food, as we feasted on... luxury items that now make the conversation look a little hypocritical in retrospect. But we were so engrossed in our conversation that we very nearly missed our spa appointment and had to pack up hastily and get on to the second part of our very indulgent day.

Watercourse Way is just a few blocks from my old house, Box of Rain, so I kind of couldn't believe I had never been there before. I guess I didn't splurge like this in college. We had our own private hot tub room and when we came out, we felt like little melted pools of becky and danny. It turns out when all the tension is released from your muscles, they don't do as good a job of holding you up. Feeling now completely relaxed, and still having some remains from the picnic we hadn't had time to finish, we decided to have round 2 on Stanford campus. We went to the Rodin sculpture gardens, which seemed appropriate because that was where we had started out the night our relationship began. We thought that would be romantic, until we remembered that all the sculptures in that collection are studies for the Gates of Hell. So if you actually look around you, it's a little weird and decidedly unromantic to notice all the contorted and tortured looking figures. So we didn't look around us, just enjoyed the sunshine and reminisced about our Stanford days and listened to a baby make gurgling sounds and realized it was time to get back home to our baby.

Jack had had a wonderful day with his grandma and grandpa. They went for some walks, read some books, had some tummy time, and Jack showed them how he's ready to launch himself into flight, from his perch on the edges of your knees. I was so happy to see him after a long and rejuvenating day away, but even happier to see how happy he was. Grandparent time is so special and Jack is so lucky to have such invested grandparents. And we are so lucky to have someone swoop in and take care of everything for us so we can go play!