Inside a Marriage After an Emotional Apocalypse - 2

You may remember my post on marriage after loss from a few months ago; it was one that I was particularly proud of.  It was honest and raw and offered a look into an intimate part of my life.  I know things can get heavy around here, but I promise, it's not all bad, all the time.  I've mentioned before that Dave makes me laugh a lot.  I'm pretty lucky I married such a funny guy.  We also share a lot of similar interests and we can spend an evening watching movies we've seen a million times and repeating the dialogue verbatim, or going out for a nice walk in our neighbourhood.  Despite the fact that we are very comfortable with one another, we do have a lot of fun together but sometimes, it just requires so much effort.  Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of losing Isla has been trying to get our mojo back.  We were there together during those awful days in the hospital and he was right by my side as I pushed our daughter out.  He knows the depth of the loss - he was all up in it.  So of course, when we're sad, we automatically turn to each other (and sometimes, against each other) with our grief.  This can sometimes make for periods of anger and guilt, and sometimes, we can say hurtful things to each other, but I have never doubted the depths of Dave's love for me.

That's all to say that we can still have fun together.  Last year we took a couple of trips together - to Washington and to one of my favourite cities in the world, NYC.  We travelled there by bus (never.again) and stayed in apartments we rented through AirBnB and had a great time getting lost in these American cities.  We are excellent travelling companions that can spend all day walking through museums and historic sites and talking subways to find the perfect hot dog.  Lately, though, we've fallen into a bit of a slump.  Blame the cold weather and living on one income, but we have been some hardcore homebodies.  We are now trying to get out more in our adopted city of Toronto and we started last weekend.   We met up after work, still in our professional finery (Dave currently has a temporary contract) and went to the Royal Ontario Museum.  It was fantastic.  They have one of the best dinosaur collection I've ever seen as well as ethnographic exhibits (the Native and African ones were the best) and the best thing was that Fridays are cheap nights.  Fab.

After a couple of hours wandering around through history, we took the subway AND the streetcar (God almighty, I hate the streetcar) and headed to Queen St. East to eat at Prohibition for Winterlicious (Winterlicious is one of the those fabulous things in the city.  There is also Summerlicious which we have been going to each season.  Many restaurants offer menus at prix fixe which would give you the opportunity to try new places.  Some of the best restos in the city participate.).  It was a solid 7/10 (oh the curse of being serious eaters/cooks!) and we just enjoyed ourselves.  It was like dating again.  We talked things over and agreed that it was a feeling that we would work at reliving over and over again.

Totem Pole from B.C at the ROM (it was massive)

Headdress (I'm sorry, I can't remember the tribe)

Stegosaurus!!!

Museum subway station

Prohibition

Duck poutine as a starter!!