State of a union

When we came home late on Sunday night the house felt strangely empty. It's as if we didn't remember how it used to be.

Then we settled in. Suddenly we had all this time! I picked up toys left everywhere by a certain little boy on Friday, and something completely unheard of happened: they stayed in place for the whole week, instead of littering back the floor ten minutes later! We sat down with our feet up and a beer (alcohol-free for me) after coming home from work, we ate dinner at 8 in front of the TV. We slept in a little later, and *everything* felt less rushed.

We talked to LP on the phone every night, and of course he was having a blast. He would always talk to M longer than me: when I picked up the phone, he would basically just say, Mommmmyyy, and get silent or start talking baby-ish, only shouting a few key phrases (I took the bus twice with grandma today!) here and there for good measure. Then M would take over, and he would get all chatty for 5 minutes, going into great details about what he'd done ("we went to Toys'R'Us and grandma got me a toy car with doors that open but then I dropped it in the garbage pan and we couldn't get it back").

Surprisingly, we were different. More relaxed. We were really enjoying each other's company, flirting and teasing and being silly and making little jokes. One night M said, let's go for a ride, and we drove around at dusk in the nearby rural areas, potentially looking for a nice place to live, but finding nothing but corn fields. "They're creepy!" I'd say. "Ooh-ooh, I'm scared!" he'd reply. "We wouldn't want to be one of the million people who die from corn field-related causes every year".

Another night he picked me up at work and we had dinner in a Japanese restaurant downtown followed by a movie. Even though he really wanted to see Inception he let me pick The Kids are All Right, instead. The last time we had done that was in September 2008; enough said. He often had his hand on my belly, chuckling, as bébé has recently won the title of most active fetus in the history of the world.

By Thursday, we were really missing our son and feeling ready for him to come home. Yes, despite all the wonderfulness of the last few days and the more frequent sex. "Would you go back to our pre-kids life?" I asked. "Never in a million years!" he immediately replied, to my great relief. "Even if it might eventually drive us nuts," he added with a mock-crazy smile, while kissing my forehead. We were really on the same page.

And I feel both completely comforted by this ability we have to find each other again when given the chance, and inspired to pursue this relaxed attitude in our "real" life. Maybe I don't have to be so stressed about things running as-I-want-them smoothly during our usual weeknight "rush hour", growing impatient at him for not jumping to complete a task the second I ask him to. Maybe we can take five more minutes in the morning and not slightly snap at each other because we're focused on our own agendas for the day. Maybe sometimes we can just eat crackers, cheese and olives instead of me feeling the need to put a complete, home-cooked, balanced dinner on the table every night. Maybe we're even ready for a babysitter once in a while.