Dinner for Two? We're out of Practice!

As a family, we're pretty good at dinner.

We generally cook for ourselves, eat together around the kitchen table, and make less of a mess each day.  Well, at least Mimi does thanks to her new bib, a gift from her adopted Grandmother, Mrs. Hoshino, in Japan.

We can even entertain with general ease.  Last week we invited our friends Hanayo and Juan over for steak and salmon.  A delicious dinner was on the table 30 minutes after firing up the barbecue.  I cannot begin to express just how comforting it is to be able to grill again.  There's something in every man's soul that screams to set fire to meat.  It also means that I'm less likely to do the dishes!

Nearly 16 months of dinner for three has taught us how to cook quickly and efficiently.  By learning how to cut down on our prep and clean-up time, we've been able to eat as a family each evening without it feeling like a chore.  We were feeling good about our dinner skills.  But all that changed Saturday night.

With Grandpa Reber out of town on a hike, Grandma decided to come in and stay an evening with us in San Francisco.  This meant that for the first time since Mimi's birth, Steve and Sumie had the opportunity to go to dinner as a couple.  We were excited.  We'd had the occasional lunch together when Mimi was in daycare, but we'd not been on a date in 16 months.  Perhaps more.

And so we prepared.  Thanks to a local foodie show, we settled on a nice little restaurant in Hayes Valley called "Sauce," which offered portobello mushroom fries, tater tots in truffle oil with gruyere and bacon dipping sauce, and many other tasty tidbits that reward the palate and punish the waistline.

The food was great, the ambiance relaxed, and the restaurant relatively quiet.  Everything we were looking for.  But despite the great setting, something was off.  After nearly a year and a half of eating with baby, Sumie and I were woefully out of practice when it came to a couple's night out.

Our conversation, though engaging, focused on the following:  Mimi, finances, three-year-plan (where will we live and how will we afford it), work, and life-balance.  It was all good, necessary conversation, but not exactly what one would expect on a romantic night out.  By dessert our talk and our topics had finally started swinging around to us; the two of us.  It had taken nearly two hours, but we eventually did get beyond the baby, the house, and work.

The drive home was fun.  We both realized that, as a date, it wasn't all that successful, but in recognizing that, something clicked.  Family will always come first, even, at times, at the cost of our personal relationship.  But if we try, if we give it some time, we can always find that connection we shared when it was just the two of us.  With Mimi in our lives we not only have a new source of joy, a new way of living, but also a new means of making us reaffirm what made our relationship so special in the first place.