Dating life? Huh? What's that?

 

I'd recently been invited to joined a Closed Group on Facebook - a group of Singapore Mom Bloggers. It's a pretty active group, not surprising really, since it's a group of women who love to blog and are hence, more articulate than the average person. It's nice to talk to people who are as susceptible to succumb to verbal diarrhoea as I am :p Verbal Diarrhoea Anonymous kekeke...

 This morning, Evelyn wrote this blog post on her blog, and asked the question "How long did you take to get your dating life on track?" Adeline said:"Huh? What's that?" (which I immediately "Liked" and promptly borrowed her line for my title of this post).

With three kids, it is indeed very difficult to have time for just the two of us. When the kids are in childcare, we're at work. At nights and during the weekends, hubbs and I make it a point to treasure the time we have with the kids and be with them. We enjoy taking them out (park, playground, swimming, zoo, bird park, visit friends...) or just doing stuff with them indoors (play boardgames, jigsaws, read books, watch movies on our home theatre system...)... However, this conspires to ensure that we hardly have time for ourselves to even read the newspapers in peace, much less have a 'date'.

 

However, every once in awhile, hubbs and I would try to find time to spend a few quiet moments with each other. Usually, we'd take advantage of the situations/circumstances in our lives. For one, hubbs and I enjoy going for concerts and plays/performances. So a few times a year, when certain artists we like throws a concert, we'd book tickets to go. These past years, we've been to Eric Moo concert (where I fell asleep hugging hubbs' leg as he was standing on the chair having a raving good time), went to Chong Feng (Singapore xinyao) quite a number of years, Air Supply concert, Kit Chan concert, and recently to a performance by Corrinne May. Thankfully, my parents, in-laws, or my sister would help us out with babysitting the kidzes for a few hours.

Sometimes, we would take leave and spend the day together. Or when the childcare has some school celebration (for Christmas, Chinese New Year, and whatnot) so that we are supposed to be at the childcare at 4pm for some performance by the kids - we'd both usually try to take leave that day, so that we can spend the morning and early afternoon together while the kids are in childcare - yes, we send them in as usual! :)

On such occasions, we don't usually do anything spectacular. But we usually make sure we have a good meal together - whether it is a Japanese ala carte buffet, or head down to Chinatown for my favourite jiao-zi (dumplings) and his favourite frog legs porridge or even something as mundane as a meal in our nearby coffeeshop. But at least we get to eat in peace and quiet, something which is hard to come by with 3 kids!

We also enjoy having a foot/back massage together. Or we go check out some place that we've been hearing about but never got the chance to go yet - like this obscure industrial building at Kallang River that has been repositioned as an eclectic mix of idunnowhat. Called Ture (as in the last syllable of "adventure" - yes, horrible name indeed). It has a gourmet coffee joint on the ground floor, a children's enrichment centre, a ukelele shop, and a rockclimbing gym, to name some of the tenants.)

The thing about stealing time together - we talk a lot about the kids! We enjoy laughing about the antics the kids get up to, and re-enacting the funny look/face Asher did the previous night. Laugh about how feisty Shawna is. Commiserate with each other on how Isaac's whining is driving us crazy. So in a way, the kids are always with us. And having recharged by spending some leisure time together, we go fetch the kids from childcare a littler earlier, so that we can have more time with them that night. We found that we miss the kids!

That said, I think it's important that we still have our couple time, even if we spend most of it talking about the kids :) So, I wouldn't say we have a dating life - but we do try to steal some time alone, now and then. And that works for us.

Now, what I would like to get back, is the number of photos we have taken as a couple! There're virtually none in recent years! I managed to find these three above from a photoshoot we did back in April 2010!!! Which is almost 2 years ago!!!