"Eighteen Years" (...Plus All That Other Stuff)

So here I sit, in desperate need of a shower and spruce up after a day spent doing the 'right thing' (ie. the 'parental right thing'- given we have sprogged three spogs and all...) on a comedy family bike ride (Fat Baby wobbling both precariously and hilariously from the back of the husbands 'fixie') to Battersea Park on what just happens to be our Eighteenth Wedding Anniversary.

In a perfect world we'd be in our fave Brighton hotel, downing whisky, or maybe wine, and a dozen Krispy Kremes to boot - pre-posh dinner - reclining in total slothfulness upon a high thread count duvet, metaphorically moaning in ecstasy over the luxury of being sans kiddies and able to actually a) listen to music - actually LISTEN to it and not strain to hear what band is playing above incessant whining/quarrelling/screaming of three little boys  b) stay in bed all day if we want  c) read...read...and read some more (the papers, novels, kindles, room service menu, whatever...)

Anyway, in Brighton we are not.  So armed with some fine boozes for laterz and hazy dinner plans at our local Italian (did I mention we are channeling new heights of hardcore laziness these days?) we decided that having spent the morning in bed in decadent fashion whilst our two year old sorted himself out with pink milk and cheerios (not together - although that would probably be rather tasty fare to a toddlers palate come to think of it) and Egg stayed glued to his ipad (hopefully straying occasionally from the online casino he has, much to our horror, discovered and become disturbingly addicted to in the past few weeks), and Dumpie amused himself building strange and ergonomically questionable creatures out of Lego, we would at least put on a decent show of being decent parents.

So we carted them out en masse early afternoon with vague promises of a pub lunch and a playground visit after our Battersea Park bike ride, and off we went.  It was a lovely sunny summers day, and for a moment it felt perfect - almost too perfect.  Then we ventured into a peaceful pub garden, immediately rendered it un-peaceful and proceeded to gorge ourselves silly on overpriced battered cod and chips with extra chips (boys....what are you going to do?) whilst the husband carried on a most sincere and animated conversation with our flattered but confused Swedish server and I tried to keep the contraband bag of M&M's I'd smuggled in my backpack safe from renowned sugar addict Egg by randomly swatting his hands whilst taking surreptitious slurps from my giant goblet of Pinot Grigio.  A typical family pub lunch in other words.

Fat Baby immediately spilled his £3 orange juice, burst into tears, and peace was only restored after the husband and I dutifully doled out our respective iphones into eagerly waiting hands and cast sympathetic glances at one another as we wearily sipped away our collective angst, and for a moment life was okay again.  Sort of.

Then Egg nearly crashed into a pedestrian at the playground entrance, and the baby escaped one too many times to go chasing after him (potential kidnappers be damned) and we decided that playgrounds are supremely depressing places (don't ask why - that's a whole other blog post for another day) and that the bottle of chilled champers at home was pleading to be released from its frigid fridge prison.  And so we rounded up the lads and scarpered.

Peace is now restored, and as we lie on our beds in companionable silence (one of the benefits of marrying your best friend and staying together for a gazillion years), sipping the last of our champagne and trying to summon up the energy to get showered, dressed and slip out for the obligatory 'Anniversary Dinner' (despite being rather full from a rather misjudged chocolate-covered-pretzel binge less than an hour ago), it comes to mind that those 'Talk Talk' fellows had it right all along.

Life is what you make it.  If you look too closely at the myriad of cracks which adorn any relationship, you miss out on the lovely messy collage of your life and instead focus on all the needling bits that you want or think you need to fix.

My sage advice for the day is that if you find someone who makes you laugh, who you make laugh, and still fancy each other after a million years and can demolish a whole dozen donuts and a bottle of Merlot together with no shame whatsoever - not to mention procreating a tiny horde of little people who will push you to the brink of insanity each and every day for years to come - and STILL not want to kill each other...

...well that my friends is lurve.  It just is :)

Purchased by Egg with his own pocket money...bless

(Happy Anniversary husband.  May we continue to grow young in disgraceful fashion, march to the beat of the (non-existent?) drummers in our respective (perhaps deluded?) heads, and never forget that like only yesterday, we were seventeen and desperately in love and had our whole lives ahead of us.  And this is what that looks like nearly a quarter of a century on (to those of you  who may be just starting on a similar crazy journey...)