the date.

On Friday night he came home from work, a long 60 hour week, the usual kind, and with our daughter in his arms, the one who demands to be there within one second of him walking in the door, he stood in front of me and said, I have a very important question.  Will you go out with me tomorrow night?  I hesitated only because my thought was, what about those two kids that are always hanging around here. I was then informed that he had arranged for my mom to come and watch the kids.  Well, in that case, my answer, absolutely yes.

Then he handed me a dark chocolate sea salt candy bar.

Saturday evening, after another long day of work for him, he walked in the door holding my favorite flowers.  I mean, alright, husband. I’ll go out with you.

And so it happened that a 8 o’clock in the evening, this old couple ventured out the door, hand in hand, child free. How wild of us. This hour usually finds us sitting on the couch, children in bed, drinking tea or hot cocoa, doing wild things like knitting and reading.  Don’t be fooled, we’re not even eighty.

Our top secret destination was this hidden gem of an Italian restaurant not far from Uptown.  We enjoyed toasted ravioli, chicken fontina with this incredible homemade pasta and beautiful mushroom wine sauce, and then tiramisu, my other true love.  And like kings and queens or just wealthy people who have other people care for their children during meals, we ate slowly and tasted every gorgeous bite of uninterrupted flavor.  The luxury of leisurely eating is finer than gold, because even I have to break my own rule of not holding children while I’m eating, on occasion.  I’m serious about that rule, I am.  Because, my children are lovely and amazing, but a hungry mama is not a happy one and a mother who gets to sit in a chair all alone and drink coffee in the afternoon is the key to a pleasant home. I’m also serious about that.

And thus my handsome husband gave me both of those things on this glorious December evening.  Post dinner, we drove through the weaving roads near Lake Calhoun in search of Christmas lights. And we gazed in the open windows, like any decent person would do and decided that most people have bad art on the walls of their grand homes.

This was also the night were my husband willingly tried on an argyle sweater at the store, and I decided that it wasn’t him.   That sweater stayed at the store, making it officially the first time in history that a husband willingly tried on such a sweater and a wife decided against it.  Let the record show, this happened on December 17, 2011.

All this occurred one crazy, perfect night in December, when a boy asked out a girl, who was already his wife.