Childhood friend (and my current dentist) Andy and his wife Jenny came by to visit yesterday afternoon. We’d been trying to hang out in South OC for years, since they’re in the area almost every weekend, but somehow could never get it to work. This time it worked. They arrived during Allie’s nap, which allowed us some time to visit without having to worry about the baby getting impatient. When Allie woke up and we introduced her to Andy and Jenny, I found out just now much a baby person Jenny is. She adored Allie! Andy said that kids and babies always love Jenny. Allie certainly seemed to appreciate all of Jenny’s attention lavished on her, and kept smiling and looking at Jenny. These two guests are the first ones whose first impression is that Allie looks like Mr. W. Everyone else says the baby looks like me. “That’s because you’ve got biased friends and relatives saying that,” Mr. W joked.

Since Allie now skips her 4th nap and is awake from 4p-ish to bedtime (7:30p-ish), we all went to have some omakase sushi on the lake. It was a really nice visit with grownup conversation about foods, travels, yuzu, family. I didn’t know that childhood friend Sandy, Andy’s younger sister, was so mean to her brother when they were young kids! I never saw it even tho I’ve known them since Sandy and I were 6, and Andy was 7, but apparently the examples of violence done to Andy by Sandy predated that. Hilarious stories, which I’ll keep private. 🙂 Jenny and Mr. W told Andy to “get over it, it’s been 35 years!” and be nicer to his sister now. Haha! I look forward to having more time to socialize with them in the future.

Today, Mr. W took baby duty so that I could attend Lily’s no-children baby shower in Long Beach. The drive to Mimi’s Cafe there was about 45 minutes, and it was a 10:30a brunch with games, and a 45 minute drive back. I left the house at 9:45a, which means I missed the 10a feeding (and didn’t pump since I was driving), and brunch took longer than I thought, so I skipped out early so as not to miss the 1:30p feeding. I was afraid my body would go, “Hmm…she fed last night at 7:15pm, then her next feeding was 12 hours later at 7am, then no feeding for the next 7 hours…I think I’ll stop making milk now.” Even given that I left the restaurant early and skipped the last game, the cake, the present-opening and the socializing at Lily’s house and was home just in time when Allie woke up at 1:40p to feed her, this was still the longest I’d been away from the baby since she was born. I’m embarrassed to say how many times I checked the baby monitor on my cell phone. Mr. W put her to sleep for her morning and noon naps and said he didn’t have a problem, so that’s good. It makes me feel better that she doesn’t have to have me do it.

I thought this was funny…
One of their guests is a coworker/superior who had introduced the two. They call her their “matchmaker.” She’s a doctor, like Lily and her husband, and pretty smart. One of the games they played was to have the guests guess Lily’s stomach circumference by cutting a length of plastic ribbon that’s supposed to go around her middle just right. When the roll of ribbon got to the matchmaker, instead of just unrolling it to a length she thought would go around Lily’s middle, she pulled out a calculator and started tapping away. “What are you doing? Are you cheating?” another guest asked her. She said she had a dress made when she was approximately Lily’s size and she knew her waist measurement then, but that was in centimeters and the ribbon’s printed with inches, so she was trying to figure out a conversion.
“You’re supposed to EYEBALL it! No algorithms!” another guest said in protest.
What a group of overachievers. Haha!
Anyway, I asked this matchmaker doctor to take a photo of me with the parents-to-be right before I left, and just because someone is smart in their field doesn’t mean they could take brilliant photos, because this is how she chose to frame the photo of us commemorating a pregnancy:

Hahaha! Oh, well.