^{*note to everyone who’s visiting from Melissa’s utterly awesome post: Hi!  Make yourself at home, put your feet up, stay awhile.  I’m completely floored that she linked to my lil’ ol’ post.  In an effort to stop my brain from bleeding, I’m gonna drop the whole “I’m a Babysitter and So Are You” topic, but rest assured, I’m still pretty po’d.}

So on Saturday, we left the house.  As if that weren’t shocking enough, we left the house and actually entered a public, social setting without our children.  TOGETHER.  Sure, on Monday I went to a meeting without the boys with me, but they were home with dad.  This time, we both left the house and left the boys with some friends, and went out together.  Alone.

I think that was the first time we’ve done that since Liam was born.  I almost didn’t know what to do with myself.  We dropped the boys at a friend’s house.  Their son is Harry’s same age so the minute we got there, Harry disappeared and didn’t even resurface to say goodbye to us after we got Liam’s situation settled.  I’m pretty sure they played Xbox clear from the minute we left until we came back to pick them up several hours later.  They might have taken a break for dinner, but I’m not 100% sure on that.  I, of course, had a harder time.  I’ve finally gotten to the point where leaving Harry is no big deal.  Now along comes Liam and all the sudden I’m back in the “MY BABY!” phase of parenting.  Literally, as we were driving away I had an enormous urge to go back and snatch Liam up.  You know, take him with me.  What a dork.

It was just a dinner party with some friends.  But we got fancied up (which, these days, involves shoes with heels on them!  ooh!) and even brought a green salad with us so they’d let us in.  We ate tri-tip and some sort of crack-cheese-potato dish that I desperately wanted seconds of, but I’m trying to stick to this resolution thing where I don’t have seconds.  Boo!  There was strawberry cheesecake and tiramisu for dessert, and I tried both even though I’m not a tiramisu sort of girl.  There was adult conversation (no booze, sadly… and that was the one opportunity that society might have actually been OKAY with me drinking!) where we discussed such erudite topics as how you ate spaghetti in the living room while your wife was out of town and proceeded to dump it on the very pale carpeting necessitating a cover up job by calling Stanly Steemer out to steam clean the carpets.  Well, it was funny in person, at least.

The party started at 6:30 and we were fifteen minutes late (it was really hard to tear myself away from the sweetness that is Liam).  And starting at 9:00, I started getting the twitches.  By 9:30, I could avoid my basest of instincts no longer and told Kile we had to leave.  I had to prevent myself from asking him to speed home.  It felt so good to get my hands on that baby again.  I held him a little closer that night as he was sleeping.  Because, it’s true, I am a shmuck.

Still, it was good that we got out.  It’s a step in the right direction.  It’s not good to stay cooped up in the house all the time, or take the kids with us every time we go out and experience the world.  And we always come home with a new appreciation for our little family.