Eight and Nine

Eight and Nine. And sometimes Seven.

These are the hours of the evening that Michael and I now have back, just to ourselves.

For months, 11 to be exact, we listened with longing to our fellow parent-friends as they talked about bedtimes of seven and eight. Our child was up until nine or ten. Which is fine, but when Ollie went to sleep, so did we. No wonder we got nothing done. And we got no nothing done, either-meaning, no couch-snuggling, no stare-out-into-the-void-of-the-TV, no magazine perusing. Up, down, up, down, run, crawl, bend-over, pick-up, clean, clean, wipe-up...these were our evenings.

But now, the night is ours. Two, sometimes three hours, all to ourselves. We have dreamed off this day. But I'm afraid that we forgot how to do this. Inevitably the conversation goes a little something like this:

"What do you want to do?"

"I dunno. What do you want to do."

(Shrug.)

"We could watch a movie."

(Shrug). "Yyyyyeah, I think it's a little too late for that."

"Wanna watch TV?"

"I guess. What do you want to watch?"

"I dunno."

"Can you stop channel-flipping?"

"I will, once I find something I want to watch."

A half an hour passes...

"Seriously, can you just pick something?"

"But I haven't found anything I want to watch."

And then we go to bed. Maybe we'll adjust our bedtimes to seven or eight too. Sleeping is a good thing to get done.