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Home / Lifestyle

Beck Vass: How baby brain ruined my dinner date

Beck Vass
By Beck Vass
NZ Herald·
28 May, 2018 02:09 AM3 mins to read

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With Mum in town my husband and I decided to take the rare chance to go out for dinner. Disaster ensued. Photo / Getty Images

With Mum in town my husband and I decided to take the rare chance to go out for dinner. Disaster ensued. Photo / Getty Images

My mum was visiting from Nelson for a few nights, coming to see her sweet little grandchildren.

She doesn't come to see me anymore. She comes to see them. Once you have children, people say things like: "See you in a week, can't wait to see the kids."

"Yeah and me too, right?"

"Nah. Just them."

When you have family like mine, they just tell it like it is.

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So that's all well and good. Then when Mum and my daughter, five, had a fight because my daughter is super hard work and it was just one of her moody days, Mum finally admitted it: "You were never like that."

I KNEW IT! She IS hard work. I feel like I've always known this and, in fact, have made no secret of the fact. Just last week I shared that we saw a professional about it.

We make jokes about karma and how I'm getting what I gave when I was a kid myself but it has been revealed: life is much harder for me and I deserve everyone's sympathy.

I digress, however. With Mum in town my husband and I decided to take the rare chance to go out for dinner. Despite my kid being obnoxious, my Mum somehow still loves me enough to take the hit and babysit.

I booked my favourite restaurant, Harbourside, online as I have previously, and, because I am pregnant with baby brain in full force, making mistakes every few minutes at the moment, I was careful to double, then triple, then quadruple check the day, date, time and year.

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I received a booking confirmation. Yet when we got to the restaurant, there was no booking – or any space - for us on a busy Saturday night.

I knew it would have been me who made the mistake. I just couldn't figure out how, after all my checking, I had still screwed up.

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As we made our way to the car I checked the booking. I had booked Harbourside in Auckland, not Tauranga. I checked the day, date, month, year and time repeatedly but failed to check the location. Nice one.
Not only did I miss a rare chance to eat at my favourite place, I was a rude "no-show" somewhere else. I tried to ring them but couldn't get through or leave a message.

We ended up having an awesome dinner at my other favourite place, Macau, where I celebrated constantly screwing everything up with amazing Asian-fusion and the best ginger, lime and mint mocktail ever.

I might not be able to get through a day without making a mistake but by crikey can I eat.

At least I can do something well.

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