What I did the other night

When was the last time you did anything spontaneous? When you become a parent, your life turns into one big schedule. Nap time, bath time, bedtime… drop everything and go out at the last minute? Can’t, baby goes to bed at 7:30. As the kids get older, there is a little more flexibility, but now you have homework, practice, babysitters. Spontaneity is hard to come by. Those moments that actually bring you silly joy.

The other night I organized a girl’s night out to the movies with three friends of mine. It was quite a production to get it coordinated and have husbands home in time from work so that we could make the 7:20 showing of The Time Traveller’s Wife (a wonderful book by Audrey Neffenegger that I absolutely love, but two out of three people who read it don’t get it… but that’s another post). We were laughing before we even got in the car, and we knew it would be a fun night. Four moms of school age children going out the third week of August without the kids? We could have just driven in circles in the car and it would have been good. Just being with friends was wonderful.

As we were walking out of the movie, we joked that we didn’t want the night to end and one of us happened to look up and see that Julie and Julia was starting in 15 minutes. We looked at each other, squealed and reached for our cell phones to call our respective husbands at home to tell them we were going to another movie. All the kids were home safe, no baby sitters that needed to be relieved, and the worst that could happen would be we had to drag ourselves out of bed the next morning after a late night. It was completely spontaneous and frivolous and silly, and we had a ball.