On Monday and Tuesday this week we spent two whole days together without the girls. That’s right TWO WHOLE DAYS! Not nights – they were at nursery during the day and we dropped them off in the morning and picked them up in the evening each day but even so, it was still a pretty major thing for us.
Prior to Monday, the only time we had spent away from the girls together was just under an hour back in April when they were settling in to nursery. We went for a bite to eat, I banned dh from mentioning the girls and we went back to see them before the hour was up.
This time, we were more relaxed. We had plans. On Monday, we went to Lakeside and did a bit of shopping. I upgraded my mobile phone and amused the (very good) sales assistant in the Virgin shop by insisting that I had the pink model and justified it by saying ‘I’m a girl and I love pink’! We also went to Café Rouge for a leisurely lunch. Actually, it was slightly more leisurely than I was entirely comfortable with as we had the worst waiter in the world. So bad that we didn’t leave a tip. THAT bad. The food was still pretty fab though, when it eventually arrived. CR has its critics but I have been craving their deep fried camembert and mussels with fries since I was pregnant and they were just as tasty as I remembered.
It was so nice to linger over a meal for a change. At home I’m used to cramming food in my mouth in the (increasingly) brief moments that R and G are napping or in my 45 minute (wtf?) lunch break at work so it made a change to actually taste what I was eating. We have been to restaurants with R and G but they are at a difficult stage where they aren’t quite ready to eat our food but are curious enough to get incredibly annoyed when we’re eating.
We collected R and G at the usual time and aside from R having a wobbler/meltdown at bedtime because she was over-tired, it was a lovely day.
On Tuesday, dh took the girls to nursery so I could have a lie-in. It was a lovely idea but my body is now so conditioned to getting up before 7am that it simply couldn’t cope with still being horizontal at 7.01 am and my brain decided that I should get up. I tried to fight it. I really did. I resorted to reading one of the twin books I’ve been revisiting as part of my ‘Gaah! Load of rubbish!’ project but I managed to frighten myself by trying to imagine R and G as teenagers. In the end, I got up at 8.30am and marvelled that I could actually hear the birds singing.
I pottered around for a bit, feeling like I should be doing something more constructive until dh got back. We went to the O2 for another leisurely lunch (a tasty tex-mex blowout, complete with a shared gooey chocolatey dessert) and visited the Tutankhamun exhibition. We popped over to Canary Wharf to have a look round the shops and finally replaced G’s beloved monkey toy that got lost on a walk a few weeks back.
Every so often, dh and I asked each other if we were missing the girls. We confessed that actually, we didn’t really. Well, maybe a little bit towards the end of each day (the invisible string tying us to the girls is incredibly strong) but not enough to feel guilty about what we were doing. In fact, it was such a success that we’re planning to do it once a month. With twins, you have to make the most of the opportunities for escape, albeit if only for a few hours.