I am so so so thankful for my date night with my husband last night. We dressed up, my daughter shared some of her perfume with me and I had every intention of putting my high heels on but the reality set in that we will be walking the cobble stone sidewalks of a seaside village so perhaps pumps would be a better bet hahaha because I actually haven’t worn heels in well forever.
So yesterday morning, I woke up and thought no, today has to be the day when my husband and I just take a moment for ourselves and do one of the things that we love most, have a lovely dinner date night.
The past couple of months have been so hectic, I’m not even going to get into all of that because I am sure everyone has their own version of “adjusting and adapting”.
So we put our kids to bed, kissed them goodnight and headed off, masked up and ready to have a typical Portuguese seafood dinner overlooking the ocean. Before we left, it was so funny to hear Sofia say, “mum you and papa look so nice but it’s a pity you have to wear masks with those beautiful outfits”.
Hearing that observation from our daughter got me thinking about this little persons perception and experience over the past couple of months. We’ve been having several conversations with the kids about the situation over these months and she has mentioned several things to me. Like “oh mum it’s sad we can’t just play with other kids on the beach like we used to. Before we would just start building sand castles and you guys would talk with other parents next to us that we met on the beach. Now we have to keep a distance from other people, it’s not nice”. Or Miguel saying “I don’t like coronavirus, why can’t we see it, so we can just say vai embora (Portuguese for go away) and make it go away”.
We’ve kept the dialogue opened and honest with the kids and we’ve also used the opportunity to reflect on what is happening to many people around the world and how happy and thankful we are that we still have our home, we have each other and our health and all our family in other parts of the world are also well. So the best we can do is stay safe and be mindful of our health so we can help the doctors and hospitals not to become full of sick people.
So with all of those thoughts floating around in my mind, we arrived at our dinner and again the harsh reality of what’s going on hit me like a ton of bricks. In this Portuguese seaside village, that is normally buzzing with life in the summer we found this delightful restaurant almost empty which was sad to see the livelihood of others at such a low but for us this meant we could pick choose and refuse any table. So off we went all dressed up to a quaint table overlooking the ocean. It was a heart to heart conversation, an amazing dinner and it was wonderful to spend time with my husband again without anyone saying mama, or papa.
Because we arrived fairly late, we were the last to leave so when we realized it was 23h15 pm and the waiters who were so nice, were standing at a distance watching us and probably hoping that we could just take our last sip of sangria and head on our way so they could take off those masks, breathe fresh air and go home. Although they didn’t make us feel it, we hurried along our last sips, thanked them for a wonderful dinner and headed home.
#thankful #hopeful #mindful