Our Girls Night – Expectations VS Reality

We’re quite big on family time for many reasons.

One of the main reasons, is that we want to create a warm, open space for our children to come to us to talk about anything.  In fact it is one of my main goals as a parent.  You know, aside from trying to raise them to not be a chop as an adult and all that.

It’s easy for me though.  I work half day (till 2) so I spend st least a good hour or two’s worth of quality time with the kids every day.  Unless it’s homework and Mom’s taxi all afternoon.  But even if it is, we still connect.

But what about Seth?

From the time that we had Kyla placed in our arms to a couple of nights ago when she was sick three times in the night, Seth has been there.  With all of them.  Cleaning up vomit (that, let’s face it, he just does so much better than I do), packing the lunch boxes every morning and SO much more.

The thing is though, although he does a lot for the kids, it’s harder for him to do stuff with the kids.

It’s the sucky thing about working long hours and having a demanding job.  Even though you’re doing so much for the kids it’s not always noticed by them because of the having to leave early, work late and travel.  It does mean that the amount of quality time that he has with the kids is mostly limited to the weekend.  But even then, we always have something on.

Which brings us to how our girls night came about.

We’ve always talked about Daddy Dates.  You know, where the Dad takes each kid out separately to do something fun and bond and stuff.  It works really well for our friends.  But putting this into practise was hard for us because, like I said, the busy and all that.  So Seth decided to book a night away with Knox to make up for it.  You know, go big or go home right?!  He took Knox away for a night to one of our favourite holiday places – but this time they camped instead of staying in the houses.

He needs to tell you about this experience himself, but man, I laughed when I watched all his Instagram stories.  That guy and his crazy ideals.  Maybe I can convince him to write about about it.  Or at least share the story on Youtube or something.

Anyway.

That left me with the girls.

I had SO many things that wanted to do – take them for mani/pedis, go out for lunch, lots of girl chats and I don’t know.  Some serious bonding.  Like you see on TV.  All emotional and stuff.

But reality is always different isn’t it?

We ended up spending the morning with our favourite Jude (and his awesome Mom).  I love watching the girls play with him, I swear, they might even love him more than their own brother.  Then my Mom came home, so obviously the girls didn’t want to be with me anymore and so they ran over to her house.  Which left me to plan my Sunday School lesson and then also read a bit of my book.  So I’m not complaining.

Then things got real.  They saw the Insta story and could see that their brother was not only having the best time ever, he was also EATING ROASTED MARSHMALLOWS BEFORE SUPPER!  Talk about jealousy.

So to make up for it, we went to their favourite place – the Waterfront.  We stopped at CTFM for supper and then topped it off with ice cream!

Then I thought it would be super fun if we all slept together in my bed.

And it was.  For about 5 minutes.

They wanted to be like me and stay up late.  Which sounded like a good idea but by 9pm they were complaining about everything and by the time they actually fell asleep, they were so tired they were crying about err’thang!  They only passed out around 10.  Which is fine.  But I only got to sleep around 12.  By around two o’clock Riya had flipped around completely and now had her toes in my face.  By 2.30 Kyla had put her head on top of Riyas toes. By 3 o’clock Riya was shouting at Kyla (in her sleep because she swears she can’t remember it at all) that Kyla had stolen her pillow.  After being kicked in the head about a million times at 4am I got up and turned them all the right way up.

By 6.30am I gave up and made an entire pot of coffee all for myself.

But look how cute though…

And you’d think that that was enough right?  Well you are wrong.  Because when we were chilling in bed in the morning we made the mistake of watching some more Insta stories.

Which means that they totally saw that Knox was having flap jacks for breakfast THAT HAD CHOCOLATE CHIPS.

They both jumped up and screamed, “That’s not fair!” in unison.

So, obvs I had to make us pink chocolate chips flapjacks for lunch!  But I’m not complaining.  And they weren’t complaining, which means we were winning all round.

The entire thing didn’t go down like I had planned in my head.  But it never does.  And that’s OK because we had an amazing time anyway.

It also reminded me that those special moments can’t be forced.  It’s one of those things that just have to happen naturally on their own.  It’s never going to look or feel like movie moments, because life has this annoying thing about being real.  Without the soundtrack playing in the background, the perfect lighting and the picturesque scenes.  And I find the moments where we blindfold each other in the middle of CTFM to see who can taste the difference between grapetiser and appletiser way more special anyway.

Here’s to many more special moments.