Dating my daughter

I went on a date with my daughter on Sunday.

In the efforts to not have her feel excluded, replaced, or anything negative about having a new baby in the house, she has continued the Daddy-Daughter Date from her small childhood, but I realized last week that since the baby was born eight months ago, she and I hadn't really had any time together, just the two of us.

So, I made a date with her.

We left S home with Daddy, and started with lunch. We tried a new restaurant, and she was having trouble deciding what to order. I asked her what she was looking at, and she said she couldn't decide between the half sandwich and cup of soup, or a full sandwich because she could get fresh fruit as the side item. No pizza, no chips as the side. A sign of my first baby growing up.

We had a while before our movie started, so we did a little shopping next. We have a wedding to attend this Saturday; it's turned cold here and all her dressy clothes are very much for summer. We each got a new outfit for the wedding, and S even got a new dress. We looked through the dresses in E's size, then she wanted to look at dresses in my size. We got side-by-side fitting rooms and showed each other the dresses as we tried them on. She helped pick out S's, also. No asking for more, no grumbling about buying something for the baby our our day. Another sign that she's growing up.

Next was Borders. They were having a tent sale this weekend; the most expensive book we saw in the tent was $3.99 and all were buy one get one free. Too bad neither of us found anything. We went inside the store and found the book we were after. She has really gotten into the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovitch. She has read the first six books in just a few weeks, so we bought number seven.

Then it was time for the movie. We watched You Again, with Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver, and Betty White. And the dad from Alias. It was a very funny movie, by the way. The whole theater was laughing out loud. We passed up popcorn (still full from lunch - we agreed that next time it will be half sandwiches and soup) but each got a box of candy. We laughed, we munched candy, moaned about how full we were but couldn't resist the sweets, laughed some more.

The absolute best part of the afternoon? We both agreed that we had a wonderful time. She wasn't embarassed to be out with her mom, we enjoyed each other's company and conversation, and didn't argue about anything. We sang along to the radio, chatted about anything and everything, and just hung out.

And it was incredible.

I think we need to make this a regularly scheduled event.