Husband and I recently celebrated our anniversary. With the kids.
Most years we try to get at least a couple of days away from the kids so that we can enjoy a little one-on-one time and actually finish conversations instead of keeping them running throughout a whole day to pick back up in the spaces where kids aren’t talking, which is hardly ever. Actually it’s never, so you have conversations in your heads and forget it was all imaginary and then you get mad at each other when it’s time to go to that school meeting you talked about earlier this week and one of you didn’t remember. Because the conversation never happened. You just thought it did.
But this year our anniversary fell on a weekend when my parents could not take the children, because they live in a small town, and they were having a bake sale where my mom, the town library director, was expected to make an appearance. She couldn’t juggle six kids while trying to sell brownies. I don’t blame her. That would be a losing battle, unless she wanted to buy all the brownies.
So after we put the kids to bed on Saturday night, we watched an episode of Game of Thrones, season two (I know we’re way behind. Watching something together is like having a conversation together—it hardly ever happens, except in your imagination.). And then we were so tired we just went to bed at a wimpy 10 p.m. instead of the typical Friday night’s midnight hour—and it’s a good thing we did, because the 3-year-old twins decided, at 4 a.m., that they were going to climb over the baby gate barring their room for sanity purposes and go exploring the library unsupervised, which is always a scary proposition with twins.
The library is right outside our bedroom, and we totally would have heard their pounding footsteps and victory-cry screeching if Husband hadn’t turned up the “storm sounds” white noise on the computer so we could get some sleep by pretending there were no kids in the house. So the 8-year-old took it upon himself to knock on our door and let us know his brothers were “running wild in the library.”
They weren’t in there for long, but already one of them had eaten nearly a whole tube of toothpaste that he climbed a cabinet in the bathroom to get and emptied out a bottle of essential oil Husband had left next to a diffuser. His whole mouth smelled like Peace & Calming with some strawberry thrown in like an afterthought. So we took Strawberry Shortcake back to bed, along with his probably-not-innocent-either-but-we-couldn’t-find-any-evidence brother and closed their door, which has a lock on the outside (because twins. That’s all I’m going to say. You can judge if you want. I don’t care. Because twins.).
Husband and I really wanted to go back to sleep, because we still had two more hours until we needed to be up to get everyone ready for church, but the problem was, the shrieking banshees who had been set loose in the library minutes before had already woken the rest of the boys. We told them to read in the library for the next two hours, because they love to read and we love to sleep.
When we woke up at 7, everyone was crying. The 8-year-old was crying because he was starving, and he was going to die if he didn’t get anything to eat RIGHT THIS MINUTE. The 6-year-old was crying because his older brother, in a fit of anger, had taken a book right out of his hands. The 5-year-old was crying because he’s 5 and that’s enough explanation in his mind. The 3-year-olds were crying because they were up at 4. The baby was crying because he heard all his brothers crying, and he decided he should probably be crying, too.
We explained to everyone that it was our anniversary and they should be the ones fixing us breakfast, but no one seemed to like that idea, so Husband went downstairs to cook a feast of toast with jam, while I showered and put on a little makeup, because I’m not a big fan of scaring church people away with my nakedness. Naked face, that is. Geez. The words aren’t coming out right. I’ve been up since 4.
And then we left for church half an hour late and blissfully handed the boys off to the nursery workers and Sunday school teachers, not saying a word about how they’d probably be really grouchy because everyone had been up since 4, and then we went out with the baby into the service. Two minutes in, the baby started happily shrieking in the middle of the pastor’s talk, so all the heads (smiling mostly) turned toward me while I tried to gracefully exit the row and, in typical Rachel fashion, tripped over some chairs and nearly crapped my pants because I didn’t want to drop the baby. This story has a happy ending, because I didn’t drop the baby or crap my pants. But I did end up with a busted-up knee. Much better than a busted-up baby or a pair of smelly drawers.
Baby and I danced in the entry-way of the church while I counted down the minutes until the boys would be ours again.
When we got back home, the house was a wreck, because the day before we’d taken everybody to the city zoo and Husband and I didn’t feel like enforcing any of the normal cleanup rules when we got back home, because six kids out at the zoo sucks enough energy to last a whole forty-eight hours. So after we wrestled every crayon we own—about a billion—out of the twins’ hands and put them down for their naps, the 8-year-old found his way to our room and said, “Because it’s your anniversary, I’ll do whatever you want me to do for you. And the rest of this week, too.”
Which was sweet and all, except “whatever you want me to do for you” doesn’t actually mean whatever you want me to do for you, because I asked him to cook dinner, and he said that probably wouldn’t be safe, which is probably true, and then I asked him to watch his brothers so his daddy and I could go for a walk around the cul-de-sac, and he said he could do anything but watching his brothers and cooking dinner, and then I asked him to clean up his room because it was a mess, and he said he would do anything for me, and cleaning his room wasn’t for me, so I just gave up after that.
We cooked our dinner of pasta in Vodka sauce and sat around the table telling stories about the early days before Husband and I were married, while the kids listened with silly grins on their faces, because what’s better than watching a mama and daddy who love each other tell stories about how they came to be? And after all that we put them all to bed so we could stuff our faces with the salted caramel cupcakes we’d hidden in the pantry.
It was divine. Truly. Best anniversary ever. Except for the one where we ditched the kids and went to Disney World. But this one was a very distant second.
This is an excerpt from Parenting is the Hardest Insane Asylum Ever, which does not yet have a release date. For more of Rachel’s humor writings, visit Crash Test Parents.
