Gabriel has been a low maintenance little guy almost straight out of the gate, but we still felt reluctant to not so much trust him with anyone as to ask for the favour or impose on anyone who dared to offer. Even so, we settled on asking close friends first rather than asking one lone teenager to take him on. We basically enlisted a team: mother, father and their then 4-year-old who had been doting on him since his arrival and may have been ready to shoo her parents home to take over. Instead, her parents shooed us out before we could complete our eighth utterance of the double checking, "Any questions?", with the assurance that they'd babysat before, or something like it and that Gabriel was in good hands. We reviewed all of the things that might occur and reiterated our desired turn in routine and time as we retreated.
We trotted off to see Blue Man Group at a theatre that was a 12-minute walk away from home. I'm still not sure if we would have let ourselves out that night if it was a 20-minute walk or drive. We sat and never really allowed ourselves to acknowledge or enjoy the fact that we were out for the night. For the first part of the evening my cell phone sat on my thigh and kept glancing at it on a constant basis. Eventually, the show grabbed a bit more of my attention, but (no offence intended) I never quite got fully immersed in the program.
We returned home after 2 hours and 23 minutes of entertainment, walk there and sprint back to find that the dude was sleeping as he was intended, but that the routine we had requested had not been followed to the letter. Our "sitters" varied the routine as they were comfortable with and Gabriel responded well and, much to our surprise, was not thrown off kilter by the variation. There was, it seemed, even a broadening of horizons after the 4 1/2 months of being locked into the patterns that my wife and I established for ourselves.
It was not only good for us to get out, but it was good to realize that we did not need to be spot-welded to our routine.
We are still on our first hand when it comes to counting the times we've left Gabriel with sitters, other than my in-laws, for a night out whether it is dinner, a movie or something else but we are getting a little more daring. Last week we even arranged to have that competent team of mother, father and now-8-year-old take on the first stage of the babysitting until a teenager - yes a teenager but she has graduated high school and is headed to university in a few weeks - could get to our place after finishing her day job. We did spend a good part of the night texting to the team and the teen to ensure that the handover went as smoothly as it did and to let her know our ETA at the end of the show and we even allowed ourselves to be out for 5 hours. We first used our new solo babysitter last October and we plan to use her again in November while we make a 12-minute walk to see a show...
