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Wednesday, December 10, 2003: New York Poo bomb
So yesterday I had some friends over for pizza and beer and trivia, which we do every month or so. One of my guests brought me a peppermint hot chocolate from Starbucks, which was really tasty, and I enjoyed it very much. Sadly, it was 500 calories, and helped put me 600 calories over my limit. Stupid whole milk and yummy whipped cream. So I'm trying to make up the excess by being 200 calories down for three days in a row, except today I'm only 100 calories down because I had my dessert before I remembered to enter the banana I ate this afternoon. And we have a Christmas party on Friday. Hmph. Of course, I have to remember that my upper calorie limit is 2200, which is, like, 1000 calories more than you get it you're on Weight Watchers, I think. So a) my "diet" is more food than any sane person would really want to eat, and b) it's kind of pathetic that I can't even stick to that. Well, okay, I have been sticking to it, and one fucked up day doesn't change that; it will just take me a few more days to recover. (FitDay allows you to average your intake over the last week, two weeks and month so you don't have to be neurotic about each day's total. Not that it stops me.) Fascinating as that is, more New York! Wednesday we finally had something other than knish for breakfast. (Wait, knish for breakfast is going to seem really weird unless you realize that Yonah Schimmel's knishery sells cheese and apple and cherry knishes, like huge mutant danishes. We weren't having, like, potato and onion knishes for breakfast. Well. Blake was having kasha knishes for breakfast, because nothing starts the day like a ball of carb the size of your head.) Instead, we went to a bakery nearby and I had an actual danish. (I'm using my FitDay logs to jog my memory, if you're wondering why my trip to New York was apparently all about food. Well, that and it was pretty much all about food.) I think that was the day we walked up to Washington Square Park and around the University area. That was pretty uneventful. Just walking around failed to do it for me this trip, I think partly because you see New York all the time on TV, so it's not like the general milieu is new and different. Partly because I already live in a big eastern city, so it kinda has the same feel. I know it's sacrilege to say that New York has the same feel as Toronto, and it really doesn't, except that it does if you compare them both to, say, Venice, or Big River. It's a big grey city full of big-city grumpy people. After some unsatisfying walking about we met up with Douglas and Tanya, who we met in our prenatal class, and their baby Ursa. They're in New York for a year; Douglas is there on a Fulbright. We went to a really cool Chinese restaurant called Funky Broome at the corner of Mott and Broome. They have lunch specials for $3.50, and for that you get a huge plate of food. I had the squid with black bean sauce, which was good although the onions were undercooked, and I ordered congee because I'd never had it before. I had lots of leftovers, which I ended up throwing out because we had plans for every meal thereafter. Duh. We got Delphine a high chair; it was only our second experiment with restaurant high chairs, but it went great. I gave her a little pile of rice to play with and mash around. The best part was when the rice stuck to her palm and she opened and closed, opened and closed her hand trying to get rid of the rice. I don't think she managed to eat any of it, though. Alert! Baby related grossness ahead! You may want to skip the next couple of paragraphs. It was at the Chinese restaurant that Delphine pooed. Not so interesting, you might think, except that she hadn't pooed for four or five days. It's pretty normal for babies to go a few days without pooing, but of course the poo builds up the longer they go without letting it out, so after a couple of days without poo you start to realize that you're going everywhere with a fully armed poo bomb. So the bomb detonated at the restaurant (after we had all finished eating, thankfully). It wasn't the kind of mess that you can clean up in a restaurant bathroom, so Blake, Del, Tanya, Ursa and I trekked back to the hotel (Douglas had Important Law Student things to do). Here, let me quote Anni from The Usual Suspects on this matter:
...the ultimate poo explosion. We're talking the one that will occur when you out and about and have already exhausted your diaper bag stash of extra clothing. This poo will reach to the nape of your child's head, down to his toes and over to your body as well. Every single wipe and then some will be needed and yet there will be crevices that you will not get until the next bath. You will have the smell of baby poo set in memory forever. This is the time that you will wish for a self-cleaning model and wonder why the baby factory didn't have that option available. It was like that. We changed her on the bathroom floor and I think we went through a good dozen wipes. After the hose-down was over and everyone was clean and fully dressed, we all went to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. We just squeaked into their garment-factory tour. It was well done; the tour guide asked lots of questions and actually expected people to participate, which was a bit of a surprise, but I got into it. The apartments were well renovated (so to speak) and generally gave a good impression of what it was like to live and work in a tenement. Also the museum store has great stuff. Highly recommended. The next stop was Il Laboratorio di Gelato, right next to the tenement house. I had mint and ... something else. Frangipani? One of those long Italian words which basically means "vanilla and some stuff". It was great. Also recommended. That whole neighbourhood is cool, really. You'd think that was a full day, but you'd be wrong. That night we went all the way back out the Queens to watch Smallville and Angel with Sascha and Leontine. I hadn't seen Smallville before and I didn't love it, although apparently the episode we saw was non-typical. Angel was pretty good, as I remember, but mostly I was watching Delphine learn to crawl on Sascha and Leontine's hardwood floor. And eating tasty Thai food and lots more wedding cake. The creator of the wedding cake, who is seriously actually called Belinda, was there too -- she was fun. And then back to the hotel, and I can't believe I've spent so much time writing about one day of our vacation. (I also read the latest entries in, like, eight journals. Holidailies is killing me, both reading and writing.) Anyway, it's 11:27 pm and I should go to bed. Poor Blake is putting in equally as much time as I am getting these entries written, because he's on Del detail, and I think he would like to go to bed. In 2001 I pissed and moaned. |