Image courtesy of nuttakit/freedigitalphotos.net

The other day hubby said, “Thanks for playing house with me.”  I laughed because I know what he means.  Sometimes we look at our lives and wonder how we got here – one house, 2 kids, a dog and a (brown) picket fence.  It almost doesn’t seem real.

When I was young, I played with a set of homemade paper dolls, a family with a mom and a dad and a couple of kids.  I used to think about what it would be like to meet my knight in shining armor, get married and have a family.  I always thought about how nice it would be to grow up and do all that fun adult stuff of falling in love and living happily ever after.  Now that I’ve realized that dream, I also realize that playing house is a lot easier to do when it’s with paper dolls.  With dolls, there are no chores to do, no bills to pay and you can go on vacation whenever you want.  But real life is not quite as carefree and also not always quite so romantic.  Marriage is hard work, especially once you get back from a week-long honeymoon in Kauai.  And once you throw kids into the equation, there’s just a whole lotta crazy going on!

It’s been over 5 years since hubby and I have slept side by side in the same bed together, 5 years since we’ve been able to have a conversation without being interrupted, 5 years since we’ve felt young, energetic and sane, haha.  Life has certainly changed.  These days, we spend so much time trying to meet the kids’ needs (in order to stop the crying and screaming!) that sometimes we feel like we’re just 2 nannies living under the same roof.  😛

The ironic thing is that I think having kids has made our marriage better.  Hubby also asked me the other day, “Do you think you love me more now that we have kids?”  (Haha, is that a rhetorical question?)  Well, I think I appreciate him a lot more now that we have kids.  Being on this parenting journey together helps me see how well we complement one another.  And suffering does bring people together, doesn’t it?  🙂

We just have to remember what brought us together in the first place and make it through this crazy stage of life with 2 small kids.   There’s no other person I’d rather play house with than my hubby…because no one’s got what we’ve got going.

Here’s a cute song by Charlene Kaye, featuring Darren Criss, called “Dress and Tie“.

What does “playing house” look like for you and your spouse?