What's that smell?

Sean and I haven’t been on a date since we moved to Michigan in April. So when he announced he had a babysitter and reservations for Saturday night I nearly cried with happiness. (Not that I haven’t adored being with my children 24/7 for 16 weeks, of course…)

So we tried out a restaurant in Okemos, a traditional hibachi place where they cook in front of you. We shared the table with a 50’s something couple who were obviously dating, and a young family with a four year old girl and a 17 month old boy. I was quite concerned when the waitress pulled a high chair up to our table but we didn’t have anything to worry about; the child didn’t sit at the table. He just ran through the place for most of the dinner with the dad following behind.

We had a good dinner (what is it about the salad dressing at Japanese restaurants? It is so good and there’s no where else to find it!), then headed to the MSU campus to walk around. But it was move-in weekend and the place was crazy with people. And I realized I’d be thought of more as a mom of a student than a student so we opted to walk elsewhere.

We got home around 9:30 (we are such party animals) and found Rebecca asleep and Michael, Amy and Kylie, the babysitter, watching a movie. Actually, Michael was watching and Amy was teaching Kylie to crochet. There are a gazillion crocheted strings lying around our house. I have to find someone to teach Amy to connect the strings…

The kids went to bed and we started closing up the house. It was such a cool evening and we had all the windows open. But when we got upstairs and were ready for bed we smelled something funny coming in our still opened bedroom windows. We bent down and stuck our noses as close to the screen as we could and smelled the unmistakable smell of marijuana. I based this observation on my vast experience of smelling pot which consists of a being at a Genesis concert in 1987. (Sean, however, was in a fraternity and had smelled it a bit more than I, but he did concur. It was definitely pot.)

So there we are, walking through our very dark house in our jammies, sniffing at every window. And we came to our deck where we saw the lights on in the basement of our next-door neighbor’s house. And we smelled some serious smoke.

The family living in that house had just moved back to the states from Belgium, and after a quick Google search I discovered that Belgium legalized pot in 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4121098-103681,00.html). Surely they know they’re in America now… and surely they know that marijuana use, for better or worse, is still illegal here. We don’t know if it was the parents or the kids (they have two sons, a senior in high school and a junior in college), but we do know where it was coming from. I told Sean how fortunate we are to have such international neighbors…

It was certainly an interesting end to our first date in Michigan. And based on our track record, we can look forward to another date in February, 2006. By then it will be too cold to open the windows.