Date Night!

My husband and I don’t get out much without the kids. Our boys are special and I don’t mean in a unique, precious snowflake kind-of-way. I mean, like Autism and ADHD and OCD and various other acronyms kind-of way. Which keeps life interesting, in case you wanted to know. I mean it, we’re never, ever bored. There’s no time for bored! BORED IS A LUXURY. What we’d give to be bored!

So. Going out. It rarely happens because we’re exhausted by the time the weekend rolls around. We’re also super cheap frugal, so we don’t like to spend tons of dough on dinner, movies (Oh my GAH, have you seen movie prices lately? It’s giving me reflux just thinking about it!) and babysitters. But we have to spend a lot of babysitters, because we can’t leave our kids with just ANYBODY because, have we mentioned? Autism. Like one time? When we had respite through a county agency? We came home to find respite person on couch with pepsi and cell phone in hand and a boy nekkid in basement going poo in the floor. And had drawn all over himself. And ate paper. So, anyone still have questions about why we are reluctant to go out?

We’re lucky to have Totally Awesome Teenager (TAT for short) that comes to our house. She lives a few doors down. She does homework at my house almost every day. She can get them to sleep faster than I can. One will also kiss her but not me. Not like I was two weeks late, in labor for twenty-seven hours, dilated to the magic number of ten and rushed into an emergency c-section due to sepsis and shoulder presentation. I mean, I only had to endure the c-section, have them reach up through my lady parts and PUSH HIM BACK UP INTO MY UTERUS so they could get him out while I nearly bled to death on the table. But don’t kiss me! It’s okay!  Kiss the TAT instead!  Perfectly fine!

No, I’m not bitter!  Ahem.

When we do go out, it has to be someplace pretty close. Luckily, due to living in the big, bad city suburbs of Philadelphia, we have plenty of nice little hole-in-the-wall restaurants to choose from. The either have a reasonable wine list or kick-ass margaritas. We love that. And we don’t have to spend much dough, and we can argue speak rationally about things like grownups. Sometimes, we buy a whole pitcher of margaritas. But not often. Because that causes us to be too tipsy to drive the twenty minutes home, so we have to sit in the parking lot for say, two hours? And eventually we get bored of being in the car in the parking lot and start necking in the car like teenagers and there may or may not have been heavy petting, and by the way, did I mention the next time we went there we noticed the security cameras in the parking lot? Um. Yeah. Oops.

But our favorite dates? Trips to home improvement stores! To look at lighting! And TILE! And appliance places!  To look at! Um, hello? APPLIANCES. One time, we even went and bought new towels for our birthday at the Big Red Bullseye store and stuff. YES WAY! I know, right? We’re wild and crazy, what can I say? Seriously, though, we know how to live. We stay out until EIGHT-THIRTY. And one time we stayed out until NINE O’CLOCK.

Rebels, y’all.

Marj Hatzell isn’t a writer but she plays one on TV. She’s a Domestic Engineer, Total Babe, and SAHM of two boys with Autism, ADHD and a variety of other acronyms. Marj was picked last for dodge ball in grade school, was a band geek (she played the flute, and one time, at band camp…), and prefers dogs more than people, which means she has STELLAR social skills.You can find her at her non-paying day job, the wildly unsuccessful blog The Domestic Goddess, at Twitter, and on Facebook.