The Third Wheel

Another Friday. Another Date Night! This one, with a bit of a caveat.

Butterfly (16) flitted around all day, preparing for a weekend retreat up north with her church youth group. A nice thing about parenting teens is that they can pack for themselves. A difficult thing about parenting teens is that they pack for themselves. Items that are entirely inappropriate. But my gosh, I need to pick my battles, and I’d rather save up my “no’s” for issues like beer bongs. I did suggest, however, that Butterfly might want to think about bringing some warm sweaters in lieu of the light-weight, albeit trendy tank tops, considering the temperatures were predicted to be in the negative digits over the weekend. She answered with a snarl, and then complained about how she had no more room for anything else, since she still had to pack some snacks for the girls in her cabin. And to please stop trying to control her. So I bit my tongue as she stuffed enough junk food into her bag to feed the entire camp and a forest full of wildlife. And I said nothing as she jammed her large iHome iPod base into another bag, toward this supposedly electronic-free retreat weekend. Soon enough, she was on a bus full of teens, headed toward Wisconsin.

Then Rock Star (13) made plans to see “Cloverfield” with his friends. Adolescent boys are generally not ones to sweat details. He didn’t consider my questions; “What time is the movie playing?”, “What theater are you going to?” and “Who will be driving?” as anything more than annoying distractions that delayed his social agenda. So it took about 18 different phone calls between him and his friends to nail down the details. But finally he was off to his friend’s house; plans firmly set.

Now it was 6pm, and Super Hubs and I breathed deeply, looking forward to our evening together. The night was still young, and we looked forward to catching up over a romantic dinner of fabulous food! I poured us each a glass of wine to sip and enjoy while we mulled over various dining options for tonight. Did we have a yen for Italian? How about that sushi place? Maybe we should get a little crazy and drive to that new restaurant with the great tapas we’d heard about?

And then Little Squirt entered the room and declared he was hungry. Super Hubs and I looked at each other, and our eyes grew wide at the same thought. We had no sitter for Little Squirt! No older sibling was home tonight, to watch our youngest, as was usually the case on our weekly Date Night! The baby of the family would have to join us.

Resolved, we clanked our wine glasses together in a half-hearted cheer and said, “To a Date Night for Three!” And we headed to a local kid-friendly restaurant, where Little Squirt happily ate his pizza and chattered non-stop. It was not the amorous night we’d envisioned. No tantalizing of the food palates with gourmet. No deep soul-sharing; fingers linked over plates of fettuccine. It was a very different kind of evening that made Little Squirt extraordinarily happy; interloping on one of his parents’ mysterious Date Nights.