Finally Getting Out

I wasn’t able to to to Vienna with Gary and his parents, but I was able to get out Friday night for a date night.  Wahoo!!!  I had been looking forward to this since before his parents even came… free babysitting!  So, we decided to go to a restaurant that we had never been to before and a ballet version of Gone with the Wind.  I was able to order a dish that sat well with my stomach, so that was good.  Afterward we went to the ballet.  We both enjoyed it a lot.  We weren’t sure how Gone with the Wind would be in a ballet, but we knew the story.  Well, at least I thought I knew the story.  I saw the movie once on TV about 15 or 20 years ago, but it was where they show it over several nights or something like that.  When watching the ballet, I kept thinking that they were going through the story pretty quickly, but then about 1/2 way through, I realized that I must not have seen the 2nd part of the movie.  Actually, I remembered a couple of things from the end, but I never knew that Rhett and Scarlett got married or had a daughter or what happened to their daughter.  My pregnancy brain isn’t that bad, so, somehow I missed a major part of the movie when I watched it.

I thought it was a wonderful evening.  We have only been out to eat once on our own since Ethan was born, and that was to a local restaurant when our friend, Emily, offered to babysit him for free.  We have paid a babysitter a couple of times to go to the ballet for Gary’s birthday last year and then to go to one or two movies.  We end up spending over an hour just driving to the place we are going and then back home since we live outside of the city, so it ends up costing a good bit to pay a sitter.  If we would have paid a sitter for Friday night, we would have paid them the same amount that it cost us for dinner AND the ballet (course, we did get the $5 tickets too where you sit way up high).  The only bummer about the evening was that when we came out of the opera house, we had a parking ticket.  We thought that parking in the city was free everywhere after 6:00, but we found out that we were wrong.  So, in a sense we didn’t save the money from paying a babysitter.  That was very disappointing.  I’m still thankful that I was well enough to even go out with Gary.

I was also able to go with everyone to the Covered Market on Saturday.  Here is a picture of Ethan touching the hot peppers that are common in Hungary.  Thankfully I thought to wash his hands off before he touched his eyes or put them in his mouth, or we probably would have had a crying child on our hands.

The main floor of the Covered Market is a bunch of different kinds of food stands.  You can see a fruit and vegetable stand behind Gary and his parents.  Over to the right is a meat stand where you can see sausages hanging down.  The upper floor has a bunch of touristy stalls.      This is the Danube River with a famous hotel (Gellert) and the Freedom Bridge behind.  Ethan is pointing to a tram that is going by (he loves different modes of transportation).  Kent was more focused on the tram in this picture too.Gary and I thought this was a great picture of Kent, Debbie, and Ethan in front of the parliament building.