A Romantic Dinner for 5...

Ryan and I celebrated out 8th wedding anniversary on Monday, May 12th.

What a wonderful 8 years it has been.

This past month has been particularly busy for us. Ryan has traveled to Texas to be with his dad twice now (and is there right now). When he's here he's squeezing in long work hours and time with the kids. So we scrapped any plans we had thought of for actually doing something to celebrate our anniversary...just meeting everyone's needs seemed more important this week. So when Ryan rolled in the door late on Monday evening I decided I'd make a stab at creating a romantic dinner.

Hayley loves to use the word "romantic" whenever she can. She doesn't fully understand what it means so sometimes the sentances she comes up with are pretty comical. When I told her and Maya that I wanted to create a romantic restaurant for mommy and daddy and they were to be the waitresses she was so excited! "So romantic!"

Here was my plan:
-Change mommy into some dressy clothes and get make up on by the time daddy got home (it had been one of those days!)
-Make BBQ Chicken salad and (leftover) homemade rolls
-Set a seperate table with candles for us
-Make the craft table into the kids table (with their own candles of course)
-Put the kids in aprons and have them meet daddy at the door and welcome him to the romantic restaurant.
-Have quiet music playing to create "the mood"
-Enjoy a semi-quiet conversation over dinner before it was time to do dishes, baths and the bedtime routine.

Considering, I came up with this plan at 4:30pm and I was in sweats and was planning on leftovers for dinner...things went pretty well.

But...

Right before Ryan got home, Alice woke up starving. Dinner wasn't quite ready. I managed to push play on that music and the girls met Ryan at the door in aprons. Can't say it was quiet and romantic though....high pitched screaming, occasional fighting, and running around with excitement. I told Ryan we were short on kitchen help and sent him to finish chopping a few things while I fed Alice. As the sweet waitresses hung on daddy and made all sorts of loud noise I heard Ryan yell to me...."This is so romantic!" We had a seperate table so once we all did sit down and eat you'd think we could have a couple minutes of quiet conversation. Oh no, Maya wouldn't stay on her chair and we had a constant dialog going on with the other table. Okay, well we tried!

I guess the lesson learned is...dinner for 5 just isn't romanitc!

But it'll make for a fun memory to laugh about when we celebrate our future anniversaries. Someday, we may even miss the fact that there are no little girls to get giddy and wound up because Dad and Mom are eating at a perfect "romantic restaurant"!

And for those of you that may think I'm complaining...in this season of our lives, I'm okay with the fact that our anniversary may never include lavish weekend get-a-ways (although it doesn't hurt to dream!) but I sure am glad that I'm married to someone that can laugh with me at our feeble attempt to be romantic!