Day 17- The Love Dare With Kids

Day 17- Prepare a special dinner at home just for the two of you. The dinner can be as nice as you prefer. Focus this time on getting know your spouse better, perhaps in areas you've rarely talked about. Determine to make it an enjoyable evening for you and your mate. (Kendrick 89)

I have really been enjoying The Love Dare. Each day gives me new ideas for telling Hubby I love him or suggests ways I can be a better spouse. I've been encouraged that a lot of the suggestions are already things we're doing.

Some, though, have proved to be extremely difficult logistically. Hubby commented today that the characters in "Fireproof" didn't have kids and the Love Dare never mentions them either.

On the one hand it makes it that much more important to work at making your spouse feel loved. I know as a mother it's easy sometimes to give all my time, thought and energy to my ever-demanding offspring and reserve nothing for my patient spouse. Or worse, have such an emotional deficit that I demand from him instead of ministering to him. It's a battle I continually fight, to reserve enough sanity to be able to give to him and sometimes even to myself in order to keep myself healthy enough to keep on giving.

On the other hand, having kids and doing the Love Dare necessitates a measure of flexibility and compromise. For example tonight I am supposed to fix a special dinner at home and spend time talking and getting to know one another even better.

But here is where real life kicks in. He's not going to be home until late because he and a neighbor are getting a load of gravel to spread on our driveway, which in the April snow and rain turned into a muddy soup, swallowing the Stinky Banana Car the other day so Hubby couldn't drive to work because his car was stuck in the mud.

I did try to get a sitter but of the several people I called, two were sick and one was headed out of town and I finally gave up. At times I have called up to ten different people asking for sitters and with my chronic bad luck, I almost never find anyone who says yes. Even when I schedule weeks in advance my sitter ends up getting sick or backs out at the last minute.

So we'll sit down to dinner tonight, Hubby tired from working for eight hours and straightaway lifting 3,000 pounds of gravel via hand shovel and with Curly Miss chattering at her usual rate of 1,800 words per minute so any adult conversation has to be either over that or around that or under that or in a different county.

I'm not complaining. Quite the contrary, I adore my family and I am thrilled about the gravel in the driveway. But the idyllic conversation, possibly accented with soft candlelight and wine, will more likely be a quick "hi, how are you?" followed with a "fine" as we run to grab a towel for the spilled milk.

I think I need to rewrite the Love Dare to be a new "kid-friendly" version:

Day 17- Fix some sort of an edible dinner for your spouse. Bless him by offering to pick up the toys and give the kids their bath so he can flop on the floor in front of the heater and doze off. Once they are in bed, spend quality time together by sprawling on the couch, grabbing a bag of chips and watching "Survivor" because you're both too exhausted to do anything else. Check off Day 17 with a clear conscience.