Hello! Missed your face! Nah not really ha ha – it was so good to be out of town for the weekend, just me and the grumpy Dutchman, we didn’t miss anyone!

As much as we love our little grumpy dutch-kinder, it was awfully nice to be just me and my man for the weekend of our wedding anniversary. Just like the good old days, we loaded up the boot and headed off to the Coromandel to lie around, read our books, op-shop in Whitianga, have a fancy dinner out without anyone running round the restaurant like a mental person or ordering four different things only to declare that they ‘weren’t hungry anymore’. The GD did really well.

It was raining when we got there but it was fine actually – we just got wet.

We wandered around Whitianga like hippies with no jobs. Like the ‘before’ us. The GD bought books and I bought shoes from the church shops (don’t be grossed out I will clean them) and we sat at a beautiful spot and read our books while the world went on around us. The waitress stopped to say that she liked how comfortable we were reading together and the GD decided that she must be in love with him and was hitting on him. Of course! That must be it.

The few times the GD stopped talking were really tranquil. Seriously, he talked the WHOLE drive there, for most of our stay, and then ALL the way home. The man can talk the ass off a donkey. Hell he can talk the ass off an elephant. He nearly talked the ass offa me! You know that Mother thing where you can’t imagine what life was like before you had kids and there wasn’t someone saying ‘Mum, mum mum‘ every five seconds? I remember now what I could hear. It was the GD. ‘Babe, babe babe!’ He likes to ‘educate’ me. He likes to wind me up. He likes the sound of his own voice is what he likes.

Because we were taking a break from life, this also meant taking a more relaxed approach to my restrictions… Unlike the good old days we were not sleeping in our car, and it was good that I had mentally prepared myself for this ‘relaxed approach’ because at the B & B where we booked the guy was really rattled initially when I said I was gluten-free. Which is really frustrating because when we booked in September last year I specifically mentioned that I had coeliacs and would happily deal with breakfast myself if they didn’t have GF options (I like to give peeps fair warning to get out of feeding me if it freaks them out). We had a whole email exchange where he got increasingly short and rude about GF food and cross-contamination and using the same toaster not being ok. So I mentioned my ‘special needs’ with trepidation when he asked about breakie. I ended up having a ‘lite’ version of Thom’s breakfast and he tried really hard in the end – he kept running out of the house with random food to offer me and I like to think we educated one more person on the way. But it is annoying to be the awkward one.

I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t want to feel stressed about eating while we were away without a kitchen and so I made a decision to eat well where I could and to allow a few treats. Like a Flat White each morning to make up for my lacklustre breakfast, and my first ever Creme Brulee after our fancy dinner. YUM.

And THEN. On the way home we adopted a kitten. We were walking around in a completely relaxed state when he came up on my news feed as still not having a home. My friends who had found him couldn’t keep him and the SPCA had no room at the inn so I mentioned him to the GD. And he must have been feeling really relaxed because he said yes! With little thought to how our dog and cat would feel we threw caution to the wind and said we would collect the little dude on the way home. Colin is 6-8 weeks old (he is a foundling so we don’t know for sure) and he is a confident little bugger. He has settled in to his new house really quickly. Although I think Molly may take a while to forgive us.

To top the evening off poor master 7 was violently ill. He will be going to work with daddy tomorrow poor kid. Glad to be home!