Date Night Fail

Clearly, Rick and I had been out of the dating scene for way too long. We had been married eight years and hadn't had that many dates since Ada burst into our lives and tethered us to the house. Since we were so inexperienced and rusty, it didn't really surprise me when our impromptu date night went down the crapper.

The day started out in the crapper too, literally. As I was washing out Ada and Iain's cloth diapers, I went to flush the toilet and noticed that the water was turned off. Weird. I didn't get an email that we were having work done on our building. It was a convenient time for me to find out that I couldn't wash my hands since I was elbow deep in baby poop toilet water. It turned out the construction workers installing new fire hydrants down the street had broken a pipe and turned off our water without notice. Yippee!

After attempting to scrub my arms down with the contents of a tiny bottle of water, I checked my phone just to learn that all of my neighbors had to go to work without showering, and that the babysitter I had booked for the wedding we were to attend the next night was sick and needed to cancel. The day just kept getting better.

Luckily Grandma Ba and Grandpa Rich came to the rescue and offered to take my kids for the duration of the weekend. I just had to frantically pack the car and drive them out to Sycamore and drive back in time to miss the brunt of traffic.

Unfortunately, while the ride out to Sycamore was smooth and relatively traffic free, the ride home took two hours and I even detoured to avoid the one hour travel time from O'hare to downtown which increased to an hour and forty minutes by the time I actually got to the city. At least I didn't have the kids in the car to scream at me the whole way.

Once I got downtown, I ran to Target to kill time while Rick was finishing up some work. I didn't kill enough time because he needed to wrap up a few more lose ends before our big date night could begin. I decided to go home for a much needed power nap. Too bad that nap rendered me more tired than when I got into bed since I never fell asleep.

When Rick finally arrived home, I was in my napping clothes looking as far from "hot date" as you can get. He brought soup from Soup Box for dinner, which I didn't really even like, but awe, he was so romantic to bring me dinner. And he was all ready to catch a movie. Now I know why they say "catch a movie". You have to get there at the beginning and catch it when it starts or your date night fails. And that's exactly what happened.

Since I was moving so slowly from my crappy nap coma, we missed the first movie time in our neighborhood and tried to "catch" the eight ten show on the south side. By the time we got there, parked and got into line for tickets, it was eight twenty-five and we were done. There wasn't anything else worth seeing so we just came home disappointed and frustrated that we couldn't even figure out how to go on a date anymore. So sad.

Moral of the story: Keep a list of fun things that you can do on a moment's notice when you suddenly find yourself without kids. And I don't mean grocery shopping or laundry.