Adventures in Attachment Parenting: Date Night by Allison Silver
Last Thursday my husband and I went on our first “date night” in sixteen months! It’s the first time that we have been out just the two of us since our daughter was born. It’s not that we haven’t had ample opportunity to go, it’s just that neither one of us has been ready to leave her until now. About a week ago my husband was reading the local paper and saw an article about an upcoming charity dinner event. He read it to me and I said, “That sounds like fun. Do you want to go?” He said, “Really?” and looked at me like I was growing bananas out of my ears. He then quickly followed up with, “Only if you want to.”
Until now, I haven’t even fostered the idea of leaving our daughter with anyone. I just haven’t felt comfortable with the idea. Part of attachment parenting is trusting your own instincts so I told my husband that it sounded like the perfect activity for us to do as our first date night. The event we had read about was a Celebrity Chef fundraiser in which there were over 60 different food booths from different community chefs. You could sample from as many different chefs as you wanted. I have been quite hesitant to go out to an actual sit down meal as a date night because I have been worried that we would need to leave in the middle to go home. This sounded perfect. If we got word that our daughter needed us we could leave early. The timing of the event could not have been better. It started at 5:30 and ended at 7:30 which meant that we would be home in time for bed time. Which is quite important to me since I nurse our daughter to sleep.
I quickly called my mother-in-law before I changed my mind. She was beyond eager to come and watch our baby girl for us. I also emailed a friend of mine who has a child around the same age. Her and her husband have gone out many times and I thought they might be the perfect couple to accompany us on our first date night. Inviting another couple to come with us would also help deter me from backing out and it would be great to have some fun adult conversation. Luckily they did not have plans and agreed to meet us at the Celebrity Chef event.
All week my husband asked me if I was still okay with going to the event. He reminded me multiple times that we could cancel if I just wasn’t feeling it. But I was okay. In fact, I was looking forward to it. Maybe two weeks ago I wouldn’t have been ready, but this week I was. Who knows what changed, but in my gut I knew it was going to be okay. On Thursday afternoon my husband and I got ready and my mother-in-law came over. We had the whole dinner routine laid out on the counter for her and asked her to call us if our daughter cried for more than a few minutes. We also showed her how to work our secret weapon: a Barney video that our daughter absolutely loves on Netflix. My mother-in-law took our daughter for a walk and we said our goodbyes.
I don’t think we were nervous. In fact, we were kinda giddy as we got in the car and drove away. It was nice to sit in the car and talk to each other. My husband cracked me up when he said, “There are no kids in the car so we can say any curse words we want.” After we both said a few of our favorites we laughed! We met our friends at the event and I was surprised at the turnout. It was packed. We had such a great time talking to our new friends (even though most of the conversation was about our kids) and trying the different foods. I didn’t even think about checking my cell phone for a full hour! About an hour into it, my mother-in-law texted that all was well. What a relief!
At the end of the evening we said goodbye to our friends and thanked them for accompanying us. On our drive home we both commented on how much fun we had and I could tell that both of us seemed less stressed and perhaps a bit more rejuvenated. We love having our daughter, but it was nice to do something as just the two of us again, too. When we arrived home our daughter was so happy to see us and not one tear had been shed. Our first date night had officially been a success!
Tags: Allison Silver, attachment parenting, Couple friends, couple time, date night, First time away
