In which, compared to Clint Eastwood, I look like an old fogey

Saturday night Noah's mom offered to keep Ethan for us so we could go on a date. We saw Gran Torino, then we went to Carrabba's for dinner. I'm pretty sure the waitress thought we were drunk based on how we were lolling in the booth by the end of the meal. "No, no," I almost said to her. "We're not drunk. We're just the parents of a one year old."

It wasn't so long ago that 1 a.m. seemed like a respectably early time to get in on a weekend night. Congruently, I would congratulate myself on getting up by 10 on Saturdays, while Noah would sleep until minutes before we'd meet for lunch. I felt laudably productive.

"So what do you want to do after this?" I asked Noah as I lounged on my side of the booth.

"Go to the club? Dancing?" he replied. Is it sad that we both laughed? Not that I'm a clubbing kind of gal, but half of the humor was the suggestion that we might actually go do something else, after we'd already seen a movie and gone to dinner! We came home and decided to put on a DVD while cuddling on the couch. I fell asleep by 9:30. The whole spring forward thing isn't so bad when that hour falls smack dab in the middle of a 10 or 11 hour snoozefest.

This always happens when Noah's parents babysit overnight, or when my parents come here for a visit. Noah and I get psyched up for a taste of the ol' twosome of yore, but as soon as our young ward is in the charge of trusted elders, we completely deflate. It's like being his parents keeps us at a heightened level of functionality, and whenever we get a break, the drain plug holding in our energy is pulled and we fall into the sweet oblivion of uninterrupted, lengthy sleep.

We're contemplating taking a beach trip this summer, just the two of us, and having my parents babysit. My mom asked if I thought I could be away from Ethan for a week. I said, "Well, probably not," but that wasn't factoring in the first three and a half days, in which I would be unconscious. So. Maybe.