Actually, I guess it’s not as much grandparentland as it was last weekend because my dad won’t be here, but the girls will have my mother and sister to play with. 🙂
Joel and I got tickets to see “Babes In Toyland” tonight at the Patriot Center. It was one of those donate-to-the-firefighters-get-some-tickets things, and the call came at a good time. I knew we had the money ($30 for two tickets) and I had just been thinking that Joel and I needed to go out on a date again. So “Babes In Toyland” may not have been his first choice of shows to see. Still, couldn’t really beat the price! 🙂 And it’s cool that we’re actually getting to go out somewhere together. I think we’ll enjoy the time, and if we don’t end up liking the show that’ll probably give us even more to discuss than if we do. 🙂
Which reminds me… a friend recently said that she was discouraged because she and her husband, having gone on a three day getaway recently without their young children, had pretty much nothing to talk about. I was thinking about it afterwards, and I started thinking that there are really two major contributors to good conversation: shared interests, and shared experience. When we’re dating – and sometimes early on in our marriages – we tend to spend a lot of time together. We often met because of shared interests and we like to persue those interests together, and we spend time together alone creating shared experiences. Once we get caught up in the work world, the time we spend persuing interests goes way down for most of us. When kids come along, that’s exacerbated, and even shared time doing other things (things we wouldn’t necessarily qualify as “interests”) dwindles. Unless we actually plan time together as a couple, it’s easy to let those shared interests and experiences go by the wayside.
All that is to say that if we’re having problems developing good conversations as a couple, maybe focussing on trying to start up a conversation isn’t the way to go. Maybe instead we need to refocus and start budgeting time together to foster those shared interests and experiences. Once we’ve started doing that, I think the conversations will start to flow again. We’ll be friends once more as well as spouses.
As a side note, I also think that sometimes we need to give things a little push by taking interest in things our spouse is interested in. For instance, I like some of the tech type stuff Joel is into, but I think we’d both admit that he’s far more into it than I am. Nevertheless, there are times when the best thing I can do to engender a close relationship with Joel is listen to him talk about Microsoft IIS 6.0 verses Apache web servers and how he was having to use mod_rewrite to make it so the servers didn’t ignore form post information when using custom error messages. (This was last night’s conversation, after which Joel rewarded my listening by saying, “Thank you for letting me geek out now and then.”) 🙂
Anyway, enough chatter. Bridgette and my mom just arrived, so I should go be social. 🙂