After you have a baby, long gone are the days that used to be filled with hours of free time after work and endless chances to just sit and talk with your spouse!
Evenings are a blur (a super fun blur!) of preparing dinner with a baby that won’t be put down or a toddler that suddenly needs a lot of attention, feeding your family that dinner, cleaning up that dinner, bath time and bedtime.
By the time 7:30 rolls around and you have a snoozing child tucked away in their crib, you’re zonked and have about a million things you’d like to get done while that precious babe is sleeping!
It can be so easy to just continue with the blur of the night and fall into bed a few hours later. But we have found that with just a little bit of intentionality, our evenings can be both restful and a time to invest in our marriage!
Our evenings are the same every night, and will stay that way for the next several years.
We are always home early because our baby girl needs consistency to thrive (and so do we!) So, our evenings begin with dinner as a family around 5 o’clock. After dinner, Clay hangs out with Rosy for a few minutes while I get things cleaned up. Then it’s time for our family walk around the neighborhood!
We have always taken walks together as a couple, and I’m so thankful that this habit has stayed a part of our routine as a family of three! This is a great time for us to talk about our days, dream out loud together, and just have fun as a family.
After our walk, it’s bath time! We give Rosy a bath together and get her ready for bed in her pajamas. After this, Clay reads her as many books as she wants to read. Then it’s my turn! I read her a book and then we snuggle for a few minutes before I lay her down for the night.
When the baby is in bed, it is so easy to just fall into the couch and zone out with a show but we always have some intentional time first!
As soon as I come out of her room, we sit down together for a few minutes and ask each other two super simple questions:
-What was the worst part of your day?
-What was the best part of your day?
These two questions are huge and lead to sometimes an hour of conversation about things we need to work through together. Sometimes we find there are bigger problems we need to work through together and we are able to talk about thinks in a proactive way.
Sometimes our days were both simple and we spend 10 minutes talking before we move on to other things we want to get done!
Other times we get to dream through exciting ideas together and what is more fun than that!
After we talk for a long time (or a short time!) Clay prays for us and our family and anything that we mentioned that night.
This extremely simple routine has transformed our nights from not productive times to great ones!
After a long day, it is so easy to get your feelings hurt or start up an argument. We have found that we totally avoid that tired crankiness with one another by focusing on each other and our answers to these two questions every single night.