At Last

On July 17th, we marked five years of wedded bliss. Note that I said "marked" and not "celebrated." We did try to celebrate, it just didn't quite happen.

Long before our anniversary, we knew we couldn't leave the kids with a babysitter at night. There are nights when the two of us can barely keep up with all three. Often, we could really use a third person to help since, as Jeff puts it, they need man-to-man coverage, and not zone defense. Knowing that, we decided we would get a babysitter and head to the beach for the afternoon. If we got crazy, we might get some food too while we were gone.

That was the plan, at least until our last outing without the crew. We had R with us and we had two sitters for the two boys. It seemed like a good plan. They lasted 15 minutes before calling us back. L was screaming. Reaaalllly screaming. He stopped as soon as I picked him up. Ugh.

So, based on that experience, we scrapped the beach plan and decided to just go out to eat with the kids. The kids actually tend to be okay when we go out to eat, so this plan wasn't quite as horrible as it sounds. (It's just the separations from us that cause the breakdowns, and at a meal we are all sitting at a table facing each other. ) Knowing how scheduled M is at night, we thought we would even further increase our odds of a good outing by going out to lunch rather than dinner.

On our anniversary we managed to get ourselves and all three kids ready and out the door by lunchtime. Aside from me not having the time to wash my hair, we looked pretty nice. (And who is looking at my hair when we are out with our whole crew???) And no one was screaming. Got in the car. Headed to lunch. Got to the first restaurant, got everyone out, and realized that they no longer serve lunch. Got everyone back in the car. Tried to quickly regroup. As we were listing possibilities, R threw in "Olive Garden" between every suggestion that Jeff and I made. So we decided Olive Garden it would be. When we arrived at Olive Garden, there were no parking spaces. We didn't even bother stopping. So we moved on to Plan C which involved heading to the grocery store to pick up things for a fried chicken feast. We all went in, which meant R had time to eat all the samples, and she was quite happy. Actually, everyone was doing quite well, so at least we were enjoying the time together.

We had a fairly nice lunch at home, but we hated to call grocery store fried chicken our anniversary celebration. We tossed around the idea of going out to dinner, but at dinner time we were still stuffed and the weekend meltdowns were beginning. (There is a certain part of every weekend in which all three kids dissolve into hysterical, crying, screaming messes. This will be explored further in another blog...)

Due to the meltdowns, I've blocked out the rest of the day, but I'm pretty sure it was non-eventful and possible quite painful.

On Saturday, Jeff decided to try again. He got up early and headed to the grocery store. He got stuff to make an Italian feast for dinner. He also picked up champagne and our favorite chocolate cake to enjoy after all the kids were in bed. This sounded great.

He made dinner, and it was delicious. R, who is afraid of everything since vacation, refused to eat the marinated chicken. M fussed much because he was off schedule and had refused to take a second nap. But we survived. M went to bed at 6:30 and R was tucked in by 8:30. But then there was L. He did not want to sleep. I can't remember if he was happy or sad about it. Either way, by the time we finally got him to bed, we were way too tired to do anything other than gorge on chocolate cake and pass out. We decided to save the champagne for an occasion when we were awake.

So fast forwarding to the weekend that just ended, Friday was another awful night. Saturday morning was more of the same. By Saturday afternoon, Jeff and I were done. But apparently so were the kids, because they all went to bed without too much fussing on Saturday night. We even had L tucked in by 9:00. And then, miraculously, we had the house to ourselves. Even the dogs seemed to be on their best behavior. We got to kick back and watch a DVD and finally drink our champagne. It was an anniversary celebration with two dogs and three kids under three. It was heaven.