Married With Children

Yet another article has come out about the effects of children on marriage and how couples just don't spend enough time together.

But keeping a marriage vibrant is a never-ending job. Deciding together to have
a child and sharing in child-rearing do not immunize a marriage. Indeed,
collaborative couples can face other problems. They often embark on such an
intense style of parenting that they end up paying less attention to each other.
Parents today spend much more time with their children than they did 40 years
ago.

And on the very day I read it, Mama and I had a date planned. She'd taken the day off for the kiddos' half-birthday celebration at school but our babysitter was still coming in the afternoon. And so we went out. Some errands, inevitably, but lots of fun at the craft store looking through the sale section and $1 rubber stamps. She went as crazy as I usually do, which was fun. And we perused the bookstore, checking out prospective titles for our book club. I also picked up Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, with a Christmas gift card, a book whose recipes I've tried and really like (such as All-Day Minestrone). It was a real treat, even if we didn't do anything extra-special.


We rarely hire our babysitter for evenings (and, as a delayed comment on Motherlode's discussion of the babysitter shortage for the inauguration, we only use our one trusted babysitter who has taken care of them two afternoons after school for almost 4 years. Grandmas are good in a pinch. :) ). A special night out, with babysitter, could quite easily come to $150 (that's about $70 for her, $60 dinner for us, plus coffee or trinkets); even if we do a freebie evening at the bookstore with no dinner, the babysitter would still set us back. So we don't indulge often. Unless Gommie is here to do the free babysitting. We're lucky, though, in that the children go to bed between 6:30-7, which means every night is a childfree night, even if we don't usually treat it like date night. Maybe we should. That's one of the reasons behind the book club, something new and different for us to do that's just about us.

Because we don't want to wait til the nest is empty.

(And besides:

Indeed, the researcher Ellen Galinsky has found that most children don’t want to
spend as much time with their parents as parents assume; they just want their
parents to be more relaxed when they are together. )