It wasn’t just a rainy night.

It was a dingdang monsoon.

And it wasn’t just any night.

It was the one night I’d gotten a babysitter set up (aka, grandma and grandpa’s house for the kids to have a sleepover) and actually purchased tickets for an art festival show out of town, and my husband and I were going to go and have a night out for once.  Do you know the last time we went to a movie? When did La La Land come out? No, better question: when was La La Land allllllmost out of theaters?

2016.

So when a monsoon swept into town and rendered the way to the arts show impassable, I finished dropping the kids off at grandma and grandpa’s house and then quietly wept silent tears as I gifted the tickets to someone in the city where the show was taking place who could actually get there.

I could have stomped around a lot when this all happened.  The rare night out, foiled. But!

The kids were still at the grandparents’ house, and the husband and I still had the night free…so we went to my favorite sushi place.

Which was booked up and had a long wait.

I took a deep breath, and decided, you know what monsoon and long sushi line?  I’m not going to let you beat us at this night out. So we walked down the street soaking wet even with the big umbrella and ducked into the little hole in the wall pasta place we’d been walking past for ten years (TEN YEARS) and decided yep, this rainy Friday night would be the night we finally tried it.

Y’all?

It was amazing.

The pasta was perfect, the whiskey was perfect, the wine was perfect, everything was perfect.

So what I’m trying mostly to say here is: when a monsoon drowns your plans, if you’ve still got the babysitter, inflate your swimmies and GO.  Go somewhere. Go to the pasta place, go to McDonalds, honestly. But whatever you do, if you have the chance to invest in your partnership (and by extension, your whole family), don’t let anything — not a monsoon, not a long sushi line — stand in your way.  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past almost-four years of parenthood, it’s that the best thing you can do for yourself is make sure you’re investing in strengthening your partnership. Do we go out all that often? No. Like I said, whenever La La Land was in theaters was the last time we went to a real movie.  But the times when we make the time to do something other than sit on the couch watchin’ re-runs of The Office (as fun as that is!!) are times that always pay off.

So go.  Shake your fist at the monsoons of life and do something, even if it’s not the thing you originally set out to do!  Go go go go gooooo.