What Happens in Vegas…

…gets blogged about!

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We’ve been planning this trip for months. Ten days after the last tax return was filed, we headed out (super early, I might add) to Vegas with my friend Mari and her husband. The last time I had been to Vegas, I was 14 and playing in an AAU basketball tournament, so the experience was a little less than…debaucherous (to say the least. I ended up with heat exhaustion for the water park and barfed the last two days of the trip). 

At any rate, we landed in Vegas, dropped our bags off at the hotel, and headed out on the town. It was 10 am, and we were STARVING! So we headed out to the Fremont district, where we got some breakfast and spent our time playing nickel slots at Mermaids. 

Because Mari and her husband have visited Vegas enough, they have their favorite cocktail waitress, Ling Ling, and boy did she not disappoint! I won a few good payouts on my own (to the tune of $14), but Ling Ling found me a machine that someone had abandoned with a whopping $16.50 on it to claim! Woo hoo!

 

After a few hours of nickel slots, we headed out to the Tropicana to see my buddy Adam Ray headline at the Laugh Factory. He and I went to elementary and middle school together, and he’s now blowing up (starring in movies like The Heat with Sandra Bullock), and he got us into his show for free! It was fun to ‘shoot the shit’ with him after his show, before he went to his next set. We then stumbled into our hotel around 12:30 pm, and I realized that parenting has made me the perfect candidate for Vegas…able to function off a little sleep and still manage to have fun! 

 

On Saturday we had breakfast buffet at the Bellagio, and wandered the strip for awhile, which made me angsty and sweaty. We headed back out to Fremont district to see my college roomie Marie! I love introducing my friends to my friends, and so we had a lovely evening drinking and eating and then finished the night off with some dancing at an old school arcade. All around amazing getaway, that I hope to repeat again in the future!

 

Alcohol as Mindfulness?

When I met my biological mom, she was wearing a bathing suit and a skirt. It was 10am and she was clearly drunk and had a beer in her purse. I had been warned that she was an alcoholic, couldn’t function without it in her system, and hadn’t held down a job forever because of the detoxing seizures and her inability to drive.

Last year my biological dad got a DUI, and felt shitty about it because I had recently told him that I was so glad that he was a ‘normal’ grandparent for Brewer. His daily drinking of a few beers was more on par with a blue collar norm than a ‘problem,’ though maybe there’s some justification going on…because anyone can have a problem once and not have an overall disease. But, I digress.

They say alcoholism is genetic.

I didn’t drink until I was 21 because of my ultra religious upbringing and my fear of the adoption unknown. I actually remember telling someone when I was younger that the reason I wouldn’t do drugs or alcohol is because I think I would like it too much. That’s deep for a tween, ya know?

All across time and space, people have been using substances to alter their experience. Beer has been around since cavemen, and has its place historically in so many ways. Little kids spin around and get dizzy, altering their experience, and we daydream or smoke pot or take peyote or chew chat or sniff poppies (yes, I know that’s not exactly how it works) to alter our experience.

And then there’s mindfulness. Meditation. To alter our experience of the moment, our relationship to the future and the past and our thoughts. It’s a mind altering way of being in the world. And one that I really intend to embrace in my life.

But can I be honest here? It’s busy season in the accounting world, and I haven’t seen my husband for close to 8 weeks because of it. He leaves at 6:30 and gets home at 8, except on Saturdays when he’s home by 6. I’m exhausted. And with only 1 kid, and a full-time(ish) job, I am often one straw away from the camel’s back breaking and crumbling all over itself.

The other day, Boof was teasing me about all the mimosas I’ve been drinking. And I got butthurt. Because it’s a sore spot for me. When I started drinking in college I had zero tolerance and would get blackout drunk. But I hated the feeling and so it only happened a handful of times. It’s been years trying to figure out how much is enough to just have a buzz and not obsess about wanting more and more and more.

His comment hit a nerve. I don’t like that I am excited to pour the OJ and champagne on a Friday morning with Potamus. I know enough about mental illness and alcoholism to know that I should be careful. And I am. I think. The nervousness and monitoring of my level of tolerance, desire, defensiveness as a coping mechanism are healthy. But it’s hard. Because alcohol is like mindfulness. There’s that sweet spot, when I haven’t overindulged, and I can focus on the present moment. I tell my students about the ‘beer goggle’ effect, and how more suicides and other issues happen under the influence, because we don’t have the ability to long-range think. But honestly, that’s kinda what I’m going for. Because I don’t want to sit on my couch watching another episode of toddler TV and think “3 more weeks of this.” That’s so fucking overwhelming to me. The fact that he was running 45 minutes late last night was so fucking overwhelming to me.

And mindfulness is good and all, but honestly, alcohol is quicker. Maybe someday I’ll be a mindful yogi who doesn’t have a glass of wine, or a few beers, at night to try and hang on for the next few hours until bedtime and daddy’s home. I know I’ve been there before. I know this is a difficult time for us as a family.

Drinking is a hot topic among the parenting community. Do you imbibe? Know others who do? What influences your decisions to drink or not?

How Drinking Beer Leads to Yoga Poses

Sometimes you just need a girl’s day, that turns into a girl’s night. And with little ones roaming around, this spontaneous day was actually very well planned…down to the last minute, even.

We started off with a leisurely drive up north to a Korean women’s spa. WHOA, what an experience. It felt somewhere between radically amazing and downright uncomfortable. While lying on a wet massage table, getting scrubbed by a Korean woman named “Tina,” next to at least 10 other women getting the same body scrub, I couldn’t help but feel that this was about 1/2 a step away from a Korean red light district. But at the end of the day I felt so relaxed and rejuvenated that wandering around in our hospital dressing gowns with shower caps like psych patients that I would certainly go back.

And we headed on down to the U district for a shampoo and blow out, before we went out to dinner. And then, finally, the fun part of our day…drinking at Gordon Biersch brewery. YUM! On our way back to the hotel, after 1 (or 5) beers, we just had to bust out some yoga moves. We don’t do yoga 4 times a week together to not want to do them while a bit tipsy!

despite the beer, her balance is amazing!

nothing like a heart opener to end the night!

24 hours of pure girl’s day bliss. We woke up to croissants and mimosas in bed, and I felt so relaxed it was unbelievable!

Wearing heels makes for quite a workout on Seattle hills…

Boof’s father retired, which meant we got to go to a swanky shindig in downtown Seattle. His sister got married at the Columbia Tower, and so we had a sort-of-repeat event, with lovely appetizers and wine. The best part, was so many of our friends were invited, so we had plenty of young parents (or young friends) to mingle with! I was feeling particularly good about myself, since I squeezed into a pre-baby dress!

Potamus and grammy…

My parents came over for the weekend, so that they could take Potamus home from the party early, freeing up us young ones to go on our merry way and have some good-old-fashioned fun-times. It was like being in college…except our drinks of choice were fancy wine and beer over Miller lites…

Since I haven’t done a lot of drinking in downtown Seattle, I learned a few lessons about how to navigate…

Hills and heels are HARD on the body. My toes felt like they were going to fall off. But the next day…WOW…that’s when my legs felt like I had done a hard workout. My shins were bruised and on fire, my ankles felt creaky, and my glutes…whoa. Maybe I need to go on the drinking-walking-in-heels-on-hills diet…though the calories from beer will probably add up to more weight than less…

the fellas.

Speaking of heels…boys have no idea what it’s like to walk in them. They picked a bar, originally, like 6 blocks downhill that we stopped in at. The service sucked, despite the swanky reputation, so we skipped out after having a glass of water. We headed on down to Fado, an irish pub, which was MORE walking. Thanks fellas. But, another thing I learned…it is FUN to drink with a former frat boy. Whoo boy, the middle dude is HILARIOUS when lit…we’re gonna have to do a repeat sometime soon, because, for some reason, breastfeeding moms think him shouting TITTIES, is the funniest thing ever. Yes. We are awesome.

my mom friends

Drinking with moms is different than drinking with non-moms. Because we started to get nervous about 9pm. Of course, my kid was the only one still awake (didn’t go to sleep until 11:30pm, after we got home). Our hubby’s were fine to stay out, but we started to get nervous, texting our babysitters, ordering our last round of drinks, planning for our escape…before the rest of the city had begun their pre-funking for a night out. Although, we didn’t go home too soon…we had to get in a round (or two…shh…don’t tell Boof) of irish car bombs. While I had never done them before, I rocked it like a champ. There’s probably video of it somewhere…

was this after we peed in an alley? wha??? thanks post-partum bladder muscles…

Moms can hold their liquor…but not their pee. We risked a fine while going in an alley. And by alley I mean a doorway on the side of the viaduct. Yep. We were banking on our sob story (but officer, our pelvic muscles just don’t work anymore, we pushed kids out of our vaginas!), but the rest of our party could not understand why we didn’t just go back into the bar instead of peeing on the side of its building. Because we’re awesome, that’s why.

Also, Boof tried out SideCar, the alternative to a taxi, since he just wanted to go a few blocks, and taxis around here are ridiculous. He said it was totally worth the few bucks, and that he’d do it again the next time we were downtown. Cool!

all the girls!

We had fun, my legs are sore, and thankfully I know enough in my old age to drink a SHIT TON of water when I get home. So I’m tired, but not hungover, despite my foray into binge-drinking-as-a-mom. It was fun to relax as a group, spend time together laughing, eating good food, making some memories!