My in-laws are in town, which means that my waist line is thicker, my kids are happier and Hubs and I got a date night. Woohoo! Date nights in this household happen about as often as a lunar eclipse. It’s hard to find a babysitter that fits my husband’s standards. Even the people who do well in the interview and polygraph usually balk at the body cavity search. Nana and Grandpa are exempt from invasive investigation–you don’t want to suggest a body cavity search to an Italian mother from New England unless you have really fast running shoes and access to a witness relocation program.

So Hubs and I got an ENTIRE afternoon and evening to ourselves. HELLO! You’d have thought we skipped our Ritalin we were so giddy. We had enough time to break our ten-mile we-don’t-want-to-go-any-further-in-case-there-is-an-emergency-and-the-kids-need-us-plus-this-babysitter-is-costing-us-an-arm-and-a-leg radius. I even put on a dress and impractical high-heeled boots. Plus jewelry. And Hubs smelled suspiciously like cologne. That’s how excited we were.

We got off to a shaky start. We chose to go to an area that we both really loved when we first started dating: the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Lo and behold, we aren’t in our twenties anymore and don’t find crowds, panhandlers and street performers every 5 feet, singing conflicting music genres all that charming anymore. Plus, I was hungry and I need to be fed on a regular basis or I get a little agro and, though Hubs finds me especially attractive in that state, it’s not a good idea to start a fight in impractical high-heeled boots unless you’re Cat Woman.

Luckily we discovered a cute little cafe off the promenade and I found Jesus at the bottom of my salad bowl. Well honestly I’m not sure whether Jesus was at the bottom of my salad bowl, my husband’s plate or the bread bowl, but I found him in one of those spots along with my love of mankind. A big shout out to the cook at Le Pain de Quotidien. I don’t know you but you saved some lives with your over priced salads this weekend.

Then we headed to REI. Hey, we don’t get out much. Don’t judge us. ‘Cause you know what? We weren’t the only couple in there on a date night. In your face!

I’m sorry. I went a little agro on you. I just need a granola bar.

Seriously, if you want to feel a sense of community, head on over to the running shoe section of an REI. Runners love other runners and they are some really nice people, which is why I pretend to be one of them. So anyway, there we were surrounded by our new besties, shooting the breeze about the merits of different running shoe styles (you are so jealous of my date night–I can tell) and the topic turns to the new barefoot style shoes. Hubs loves any new fitness gadget, so he got up on his athletic soap box and sang the praises of this brilliant invention. One of our new friends jumped on board and proselytized about the philosophy behind the shoe–how the shoe allows all of the bones and muscles in your foot to act independently in the manner in which they were meant, yadda, yadda, yadda. At that point, I had completely bought into the lie that I am a runner and I excitedly decided to try on a pair.

Here’s the thing: the bones in 40-year-old feet don’t want to act independently. They especially don’t want to act independently after being jammed into impractical high-heeled boots that fit much better before I was pregnant and my feet widened.

I torqued all of my shell-shocked toes into the individual toe spots inside the life changing footwear and then I jumped around and did the type of calisthenics that I imagined runners must do. However, one of my toes seemed to really dislike the shoe. Apparently I forgot to brief it on my secret identity. I decided against the purchase. Back into the impractical high-heeled boots my feet went and after a few heart-felt goodbyes, we departed REI to finish out the rest of our date night.

The next morning, my toe woke me up bright and early with a manifesto about the horrors of barefoot shoes and delusional people who believe themselves to be runners. It’s diatribe got even louder when I tried to walk to the bathroom and continued to increase in volume until I finally considered that my toe might be broken.

My first broken bone. You have no idea how disappointing it is to have avoided breaking a bone all these years and then break one trying on a shoe. Pathetic. Seriously. I’m going to tell people I was paragliding with a snowboard in uncharted mountains.

I called a foot expert. No, not a podiatrist. A dancer. No one knows more about broken toes than a dancer and you can pay them in Diet Coke and cigarettes. So I called my dancer friend and got a very detailed treatment plan guaranteed to heal my toe and make me graceful and painfully thin. Bonus.

And you’d better believe that on our next date night, Hubs and I are going base jumping in Columbia. For real.