Mom’s Saturday night

I recently read a blog on ‘things I’d being doing on a Saturday night if I weren’t a Mom.’ (http://troutie.blogspot.com/2009/10/things-i-might-be-doing-on-saturday.html) It got me thinking… Years ago (way back when), I used to go out quite a bit. There was a time when I sat down on my couch to watch tv one day and wondered why that felt so odd – it was then that I realized I hadn’t actually done that in about a month as I’d been out every day (ok, so sometimes I was in class at night, but that’s not the point!). There were days when watching the sunrise was a late night activity rather than an early morning one.

But I admit that I settled down quite a bit when I met my husband. At the beginning we still went out a bit, but not nearly as much or as late. We saw far fewer sunrises. Then his schedule got crazy with work – he’s a fire fighter and works 24 hours shifts every three days. So you have to figure – he’s generally either working overnight on Friday or Saturday or he’s got to get up at 5 to work Sunday. It makes it hard to plan to stay out till 5 any night. But usually after several nights of weekends spent watching movies on the couch, I’d start to complain that I actually wanted to go out – and be out past 9! It would take some time and planning, but we’d make it out on occasion – or I’d plan to be out late on the night he worked (then we could both sleep in exhausted when he came home from work!).

Now that we have a baby, we don’t really have the argument about not going out much anymore. There’s still that part of me that longs to actually make it out! But that part is often over shouted in my head by the part that is desperate for more sleep! It’s not just that I’m tired at night when I’d normally be going out. It’s also that I know that it doesn’t matter how late I stay out – I’m still going to have to get up when the baby does in the morning (if I’m lucky, we can make it till 8, but some mornings, like today, she started grumbled before 7. This doesn’t account for the fact that I’ll also need to get up in the night sometimes too.).

But while that ‘discussion’ is over, I have now replaced it. I used to exact promises from my husband that we would go out on the town sometime in the next, say, month. Now I exact promises that he’ll give me a good backrub in the next month. How times have changed… For the record, that deadline is currently set to expire on Friday…