8 reasons not to go out

As a parent, nights out are few and far between. There are many reasons for this.

1. You’re generally too exhausted at the end of the day to summon up the energy required to change into anything other than your PJs.
2. Babysitters cost a fortune.
3. You would have to tidy the house before you could let them in anyway.
4. Once you’ve cleared away all the toys, small cups and odd socks from the sitting room, you really just want to sit down and enjoy being in the room you envisaged when you bought all that nice furniture several years ago.
5. Having been subjected to CBeebies and Thomas DVDs, you’d actually like to watch something grown up on your TV.
6. The children's ‘going-out’ radar will be on high alert, so despite your attempts to get them into bed nice and early, they will sense your intentions to leave them and do everything in their power to delay you, stress you out and generally make sure that you’re so frazzled by the time you leave the house that you’d rather just park the car somewhere and have a good sleep than sit upright at a restaurant table.
7. If you do make it out, you’ll inevitably end up talking about the children anyway!

Despite all this, we ventured out recently. Dressed up in my finery, I was choosing a bedtime story for Max when he asked, “Mummy, what are you dressed up as?”

So rarely does he see me looking clean and tidy, that he had mistaken my ‘fancy dress’, as, quite literally, ‘fancy dress’.

Slightly crushed, I resisted the urge to respond that I was dressed up as an extremely tired person pretending to be enthusiastic about a night out, and told him I was a dragon catcher which seemed to be an acceptable response.

Kindly, he didn’t ask what I was dressed up as the next morning when I was as green and haggard as the wicked witch of the west. And that’s reason number eight!

8 reasons not to go out