It’s a date

In our house, the days start early. The last few weeks they have been beginning at about 5am when Michael starts mooching and I swoosh him downstairs to his play chair and cod him into another twenty minutes sleep so that I can down a cup of coffee before hurricane Matthew hits my shores. 

From the minute they wake up, my boys are whirlwinds. The day is non-stop running around, picking up toys, trying not to shout as the baby gets hit in the head by a flying Thomas The Tank Engine book, and sometimes it’s at seven o’clock, when I am contemplating which chocolate bar I am going to smear all over my face before I go to bed that I really feel the bone-crunching tiredness that comes with having small children. 

My fella feels the same. Every night, when he gets home it is a mammoth sprint towards bedtime for the boys. How quickly can we bath them, feed them, change them into submission? Every night, we do a silent dance around the kitchen when they are both asleep and assume positions, prone on both our couches, not speaking, not MUTTERING a word as we blankly stare at whatever crap we have recorded on the tv. 

This, my friends, is the state of a relationship that is suffering under the rule of tiny people. If we had the energy to fight, we would probably give out to each other about the lack of time we spend together alone. If we weren’t so wrecked, we might huddle together on one couch, instead of sprawled on separate ones, volleying packets of biscuits back and forth until they are all gone. If we didn’t love each other as much, we would probably have combusted by now. 

But we’re getting our reward. On Saturday, the fella and I are going to the cinema. It will be the first time we will have been out together on our OWN since Michael was born. That is five long months people. We’re going to the cinema, where we will smear nachos with the fake cheese dip all over our faces and hold hands in the dark. And I. CAN’T. WAIT.