Sea Ranch & 11 Years of Love

So Sea Ranch was great, with one small exception. The great stuff: a super cool well equipped comfy rental house with lovely views of meadow (complete with deer) and ocean; fun field trips to walk along sea cliffs and through "spooky" twisted cypress trees to rocky beaches full of seals and kelp; lounging around and reading, writing, watching movies and eating good food with friends; snuggle time with Eli. I've got pix I'll eventually have up on the family photos site, but here's a few samples, shamelessly stolen from Adrienne's website cos she beat me to it:

Eli and me sitting at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the gorgeously grey and cloudy Pacific.

An artsy black and white shot of Eli that Adrienne took on that same cliff walk.

A groupshot of Jim, Adrienne, me, Eli and Josh amidst the spooky cool cypress trees on the way to Shell Beach.

The small exception: Eli woke up in the middle of the night last night complaining that his tummy hurt. Then he spent the rest of the night getting up approximately every 1/2 hour to an hour, barfing and being unhappy, which means we didn't get a whole heck of a lot of sleep. Poor lil guy. He was a bit better this morning, but still didn't manage to keep anything down all day. Hopefully it's a 24 hour bug--we'll see what happens tomorrow. (And meanwhile, I'm praying that whatever it was isn't communicable--yikes!)

We got home today around 6:30 or so, later than we'd planned due to snarly weekend traffic, and then after feeding Eli dinner (which he promptly barfed up, sigh) and a bit of parental guilt and indecision, we actually left him in the more-than-competent substitute care of Grammy and Grampy to go out to a much anticipated romantic dinner at Christophe's to celebrate our 11th Loveiversary. (In other words, the anniversary of the date we first became an "official" couple, as counted from the day we said "I love you" to each other.) We had a delightful dinner, complete with a good mix of nostalgic reflection, thoughtful relationship discussion, and mutually congratulatory expressions of satisfied coupledom. And some damn delicious profiteroles too. A perfect date night.

Some day when I can convince Josh to find it and fork it over, I'll post his version of our "origin story" that used to live on his web page, because it's a great story and because it's one of those things that seems to prove the sheer miraculous randomness of the universe, in terms of how we ever managed to get together. We marveled tonight at how lucky we were to have ever found each other, despite the odds, and how far we had come in 11 years, both as a couple and as individuals. I can only hope the next 11 are as satisfying and interesting (though hopefully they'll be a bit less dramatic, developmentally speaking). Vive le J!