Date Night: Operation Hawkeye

For the record, I have awesome in-laws. They have been an amazing example of Christ-like love and service ever since I met them and I can’t thank them enough for all the things they do.

Their latest blessing? Giving us an impromptu date without kids last night.

They watched all three kids while we drove off, unsure of what we wanted to do with our freedom. On our way to Target—because no date without kids is complete without doing an errand—we both came up with the same idea: go visit Clark and Mary to meet their new baby boy. They lived about half an hour away, so it would be a short visit before we needed to head back.

We texted them as we shopped around Target for kid art supplies—mandatory casual window-shopping without kids during a date—and strolled over to Best Buy so Jenni could reject the mechanical gaming keyboard I was eyeing because it made too much racket. We received a call back that they were at an urgent care clinic for Sam, their new baby boy, for jaundice. They had been there for a long time—which always makes me beg the question as to why they call it urgent care when you’re there waiting for two hours for the doctor to give you a diagnosis in two minutes—and welcomed our company.

Great! It was about eight o’ clock, so the visit would be short if we were going to get back at a respectable hour. We both wanted to bless them with a meal so we went to our favorite post-birth restaurant, Nicholas’, grabbed two chicken kabob plates, and headed toward the nearest hospital per Mary’s description of a clinic north of Lloyd center on Interstate avenue.

Humorously, a hospital isn’t the same as a clinic. The employees at the emergency hospital teased that directions to the clinic would cost us half of the food we were delivering.

So, after an analysis of the nearby area on a Portland map, we finally landed at the Kaiser urgent care to meet Sam. They were still waiting and got really hungry. So the food was provincial. Jenni held Sam so that Clark and Mary could eat, and Sam greeted her with a loud poop. And like the trooper-mother-of-three she is, Jenni took Sam to the restroom to change him while Clark and Mary ate a few bites. Not to be useless myself, I helped watch Amelia, their three-year-old daughter, as she ran back and forth to the aquarium.

We visited with them for a short while, watched Amelia when they were called in to the doctor their second time, but we had to hurry back to our house because we had a three-month-old baby to feed. It was great to see them and happy that the Lord allowed us to bring them food. Which brings me back to thanking my in-laws for watching our kids, longer than intended, so that we could get out on a date.

You’re probably wondering where the name of the operation came from. Well, that’s easy—it’s Sam’s middle name.