Last Friday night, I put the kiddo to bed like normal. After confirming the sweet sound of silence outside his door, I did my customary internal happy jig, trotted downstairs with the monitor …

… and handed it to a real, live, honest-to-goodness babysitter.

After the standard disclaimers about what to do if Little Y happened to wake up—extraordinarily rare these days, but there’s always Murphy’s Law—Papa Y and I got in the car by ourselves, drove downtown by ourselves, and proceeded to have a very leisurely dinner by ourselves at a restaurant that probably doesn’t even have high chairs.

If you can’t yet tell by my excessive use of italics, it was awesome. And so overdue.

My kid is 15 months old. Up until he was 11 months, we lived in such a teeny, remote town that there was nowhere worth going for any sort of date night, unless we wanted to cap off our romantic dinner at McDonald’s with a trip to Walmart. And now that we’ve returned to civilization, it has sadly taken us the last four months to get our act together enough to find a sitter or two.

Oh, how I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.

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No, not our recent date night. This is at a tempura restaurant in Tokyo during our honeymoon. Still, it captures our enthusiasm for good food, and each other.

Over the course of those few blissful hours, we enjoyed a worry-free* meal without the stress of shoving food at our bottomless-pit toddler or shushing his embarrassing screeching or retrieving thrown sippy cups. We had a sustained adult conversation without phones or laptops or TVs to distract us.

We took a slow stroll around downtown after dinner. We held hands. We peeked into store windows and listened to music pouring out of bars and clubs. And I had the shocking realization that people still go out and have fun after 8 p.m. instead of collapsing into a fatigued mommy puddle on the couch.

But here’s the real kicker—I remembered why I married my husband. Because it is so easy to forget when the exhaustion of everyday life with a small child wears you down.

We’ve lined up the sitter for another date night this weekend. I don’t know if this will become a weekly event, but even just once a month would be so good for our relationship.

Do you have regular date nights with your significant other?

* Just to illustrate that we’re still nervous parents, Papa Y made me sneak into the nursery after we got home to ensure our babysitter had not hired some sort of henchmen to swipe him and sell him on the black market. Sure enough, Little Y was sound asleep, butt in the air, snoring softly.