26 JUL 2008 : SATURDAY (continued)
Amanda wanted to go out to eat because Lonan Kai is better behaved now and our eating out will go down even more after spending $1300 a month on daycare shortly. And because “eating is no longer fun” since she can’t eat dairy. She settled on Cafe Flora because it would be easy to eliminate dairy there. We also could have gone for various Asian cuisines, but she was not into that.

We stopped by City Peoples first so that I could pick up a few more bamboo stakes for our tomatoes. I also got a pair of leather (evil!) work gloves.

Alas for Amanda, Cafe Flora’s current three course prix fixe / market fresh menu was asian inspired. She was still happy about eating out.

Lonan Kai was pleased to be in a different place as well, and he was fairly well behaved. In this picture he is munching on a plate.

Amanda got some type of vegan burger with yam fries. It came with a very tasty aoli. I did get the fixed price dinner with a glass of sake.
The first course was a fresh roll. It was good, if a bit hard to eat.

The second course was a noodle dish with pieces of breaded tofu.

The dish was alright. I think it was a combination of little things that tempered my enthusiasm for it. The ingredients were fresh, but the overall taste was a bit mediocre. Even though it was a noodle dish and predictably mushy, I think it could have benefited with more crunchy/crispiness. There were some crunchy noodles in it, but more would have been nice.

I got a ice cream/frozen dessert thing (no picture, though) which was very good. Amanda got a vegan chocolate tart. I unfortunately did not take any pictures of her food.

In the evening we debated on how we should handle Lonan Kai’s waking periods that night. There are a number of issues: getting him to sleep throughout the night, getting him to sleep without any intervention on our part, and definitely getting him to sleep without nursing. We eventually decided to punt the real decisions and plans until later and just see if we could make some progress on any of the issues.

The evening was not as pleasant as the night before, although I did get a lot more sleep. Amanda did end up nursing him the one time he woke up. Fortunately, he only woke up once.

27 JUL 2008 : SUNDAY
Amanda went on her usual grocery run with Mandy. She took Lonan Kai with her because she wanted to start keeping him up three hours in the morning before her first nap. I don’t recall what I did; idle cleaning, reorging the garage a bit for Armando, and perhaps other random things.

I spent a bit of time in the garden staking the rest of the tomatoes, pruning them, etc..

Amanda at some point went to REI to pick up some stuff she ordered. Our P-Patch neighbor is the manager of the downtown store, and she gave us a friends and family coupon to use online. Amanda bought a portable LP stove (for car camping really) and a new wallet for me.

I made a random pasta thing for dinner. I was going to make pesto, but I did not get enough basil from the farmer’s market last week.