When the sun shines, they slip into the shade.

We know that everything we’re doing right now is leading up to baby. There are great big preparations around every corner. It is on the edge of our mind always. We listen to our friends and hear the complaints and revel in the happiness that we hear between the complaints. We are ever-planning. Our planning is not always the wisest or most conventional. What we are focusing most on right now is romance. Bring it! May we have romance with every day and (especially) with every night. We completely understand that when baby comes, all bets are off. Everything changes. Time is consumed by the crying one. This weekend, we bought another diamond band for the outside of my engagement and wedding rings. It has always been the plan in my head, but perhaps not in Mr. Husband’s head. Mr. Husband cringed when I lept into the air with joy! Want! Want! We jumped now when opportunity knocked and purchased the last Scott Kay wedding band that was identical to my current band that Bailey, Banks and Biddle had to offer. The jewelry store is closing in Birmingham. Another sad sign of the woeful economic times. The price was right, so we pounced.

That was a silly frivolous thing for us to do, but we did it because we will not be able to live like this—this right now—ever again. If all goes right and we squeeze out a sire to the Werewolf Lane throne, all will change. None shall pass. We will long for a shrubbery.

It is stuff like this that we’re sucking up with the no-freedom-all-for-baby future we have in mind. When we go to the bookstore to purchase books for a kid birthday (we always purchase books for any kid party), we have been secretly stocking our own hope chest with books … and clothes and puppets. Must have puppets. While not all items come directly from the bookstore, we are accumulating in an effort to see our baby dream realized. Every item we buy is precious to us. Mr. Husband is so good to encourage his crazy wife. What a fine man!

Mr. Husband and I ventured out on a Wednesday night for revelry that turned into a sweet, sweet date night. Surprise. Oh, yeah. We have romance. It snuck up on us from behind. It was riding on the back of an old vinyl record. We set out for an evening with leetle brother Chris at the Crestwood Coffee Shop where he works. He invited us to Open Vinyl Night at the coffee shop. We told him we didn’t own any vinyl records. We advertised our not being hip very loudly. We basked in our shame. And then we went on a mission: what if we became hip? Sounds crazy. Not possible. No. Yes. It can be done. We must set a course for hip! We can.

And we did. Well, maybe we did not achieve complete-total-sublime hipness, but we made a darn good effort. Our parents would be proud, but that’s not very hip. We know. We took a chance and ventured onto the other side of town. We like our leetle brother, so the evening couldn’t be all that bad, right? The evening was marvelous.

When we got to the Crestwood Center, the place that the coffee shop calls home, we saw that Crestwood Antiques was still open. We raced into the store before the owner could lock the door, and then we scoured the wall of vinyl record albums. In the brief five to seven minutes that we spent flipping through album covers, asking each other, “does this look hip?” “what about this one?” we noticed that a highly popular album at the antique store is “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
Too easy. There was lots of Chrystal Gale, Alabama, and Three Dog Night. There were entire sections devoted to music where you might know one song for the band but hardly recognize the entire album. There was an overwhelming 1950s section with orchestras accompanying some crooner in a white tuxedo—I call him Any Crooner. There was album after album after album for a dollar. A dollar. Dig it. We did.

We didn't have a lot of time. We had about eight minutes to establish ourselves as hip. We could hear the TV game show clock ticking down as we tried quickly to pick albums that would make us seem hip. Anything but Kenny Rogers! Skip over the 80s! Dodge Laura Brannigan! We moved fast.

We found four albums that we deemed potentials for establishing our newly found hipness: Instant Funk, Witch Doctor; Warren Zevon, Stand in the Fire; The Association, Greatest Hits; and Pearl Bailey, Around the World with Me.

As we sat at our table in Crestwood Coffee, he reading a book on the martial way of life and me reading a book on Teddy Roosevelt (both books that are part of the Crestwood Coffee library), we waited on pins and needles to hear the songs we’d picked out at random with blindfolds on.

Pick after pick was wonderful
and evoked great emotions and a dancing husband and wife. After a glass of wine, the two of us spent more time dancing in a sea of coffee-drinkers than we did tucked into the pages of our orphan books. We enjoyed one of the finest surprise-date-night-with-vinyl-and-dancing than we’ve ever had. And we will do it again. We will grow our vinyl. We will polish it like a brass band. We will venture there Wednesday after Wednesday until that blasted baby decides to make its appearance in our life.

Between the stress of trying to conceive—we must live. And we will. Crestwood Coffee and its Open Vinyl Night is where we will do that living.

The best part of the night was when Pearl Bailey sang in her velvety tones about Loch Lomond. We honeymooned in Scotland on the Highlands (as Dylan instructed we should), and that blind-folded pick put us right back there in our wool and our hats while walking in the rain. We were meeting in Scotland again in the morning in our heads and life was anew. May it continuously be so until baby Stewart decides to surprise us.