fondue

my husband does not like to cook his own food at restaurants. it actually cracks me up a little bit. There is a restaurant in hawaii that all of our friends love, Shorebird, but you cook your own food at this big communal grill. cris hates that restaurant. Tonight i selected Mona Lisa Fondue for my birthday dinner (or actually pre-birthday dinner, since my actual birthday is tomorrow) . This, of course, involves cooking your own food. The restaurant was adorable and romantic. It is in the little artsy town of Manitou Springs, in an old victorian house, with all the rooms decorated with little twinkle lights. Perfect. really perfect. Made even more perfect by the fact that cris grumbled the whole meal (in a comedic way, of course) about cooking his own food at a restaurant. and he grumbled about the ridiculousness of dipping a strawberry in cheese fondue. His tune changed a bit when they brought out the "Flaming Turtle" for dessert. Chocolate fondue with caramel and walnuts swirled in. Into this Flaming Turtle we dipped everything from bananas to cheescake. it was fabulous.
and we got to just enjoy dinner, baby free, and talk about whatever we wanted. No interruptions to wipe pizza out of Nova's hair, or cut food into bite sized pieces. In fact, we even left the restaurant without spending several minutes picking up pieces of half chewed food off the floor. it was a perfect 31st birthday dinner.
when we came home cris revealed what my present was *supposed* to be. He had truly tried his very hardest, but due to circumstances out of his control, was unable to completely pull it off just yet. We have a hot tub in the backyard that hasn't been up and running since we moved in. Cris spent the week scrubbing it out, and doing maintenance to get it working. He was putting on the finishing touches when he discovered that the previous owners had let it freeze with water in the pipes, which completely destroyed the mechanism of the hot tub. it is going to take a whole lot of work to get it up an running at this point, so i will just have to wait a little longer for my totally awesome present. i really had no idea cris was working on this, and it is going to be awesome when it is up and running.
my actual birthday probably isn't going to be that awesome, only because my work schedule is really terrible tomorrow. I am the "walkin" doc (formerly referred to on my blog as Dr. Death) this week. Mondays are always crazy busy due to all the pending issues from the weekend, along with all the weekend ER visits that will end up in the GYN walkin clinic tomorrow. On top of that i have 2 "add-on" surgeries to squeeze in between seeing patients, as well as assisting the L&D doc with a cesarean section on a lady who has had 3 prior c/sections and is going to have a belly full of scar tissue. needless to say, i am probably going to be running around like a partially crazy person tomorrow, and that is definately not my favorite scenario. oh well, hopefully it will all work out and go smoothly and i can keep up a smile all day :)