Last week was my good friend’s birthday and like me, she popped out kids back to back, 16 months apart, which meant we both had the same momentary lapse of judgment. Date nights are rare events, not because we’re lame, married, boring people, but that trustworthy sitters are really hard to come by. The good ones, i.e. kids with no arrest record, know that they’re in high demand, thus can play the game of extortion and can charge as much as a car payment and require a 20% tip.

Even a bigger deal is when we want to double-date with my friend and her husband. The planning started 2 weeks ago, going back and forth on a suitable date, scoring a sitter each, keeping our children quarantined in a bubble so that they wouldn’t catch any dreadful diseases, and of course collecting every bit of loose change into a jar just so we could afford a good night out without having to turn dish-washing tricks in a restaurant kitchen to pay for our meal. Read the full story