photo by gluioo, via flickr creative commons
Sean and I went for a bike ride Saturday. A 2.5 hour bike ride. Together. We left home together…rode up a mountain together…and rode home together. I know this might not sound that exciting to you, but it was a big deal for us. Most Saturdays we don’t even see each other before noon at the earliest. He’s gone before I wake up and when he gets back, I’m out the door before he can even mix a glass of Gatorade. This is the behind-the-scenes reality of two parents wanting to get substantive weekend workouts in, yet feeling like we should be with our kids during every moment of non-work daylight. It’s very efficient and very…unromantic.
Ever since having kids, I’ve felt like one or both parents need to be with the kids if they’re awake and we’re not working. We even negotiated AWAKE and ASLEEP rates with our babysitter so that we didn’t feel frustrated about paying exorbitant babysitting rates for someone who never even see the whites of our children’s eyes (99% of the time). Rather than go out and bask in the early evening sunshine or catch a happy hour, we usually head out after dinnertime/bathtime/bedtime only to fight off falling asleep in our soup (movies are out of the question after 7pm). So this is why a daytime date (yes, we call a bike ride a date) was so extraordinary.
Don’t get me wrong…this wasn’t our first daytime date. But daytime dates haven’t historically happened very often, and this was the first time I actually asked myself about the why. Here’s the list of trade-offs I could come up with:
- PROS: both of us waking up when it’s light outside, going out to breakfast as a family, doing an art project, working out together, feeling happy for the rest of the day, wanting to spend the rest of the day with the kids, kids get to play at park with fun babysitter
- CONS: we get a bit less time with the kids, kids “had” to play at the park with fun babysitter
Enough said — this was a true case of quality over quantity — on both the date and the kids front. We had better quality family time (all of us together versus ships passing in the night), and Sean and I stayed awake throughout our whole date. It was a win-win, and while it might not become our weekly reality, it will definitely happen more often from here on out.
If you have kids, how do you feel about daylight babysitting? How do you manage to get your weekend workouts in?
wellfesto 