If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times: date your spouse.

And I agree.

Married life does not mean that you stop pouring time and energy into each other. It’s absolutely vital to a marriage and I completely believe in this practice.

However, I’m gonna take a chance and throw a new one out there: date your kids, too.

Okay, so that may sound weird, but I’m serious.

You may be sitting at home right now, holding an infant, thinking ‘Lady, you are crazy,’ because you are in the stage of doing nothing but dating your infant, and I get that. But as a mom of three active boys, you’re gonna have trust me on this one, because one day you will want this advice.

Why?

Because they grow up fast.

And once you add more kids to the mix, a few travel sports, careers, pets, school activities and all the extras, you will no longer be intentionally pursuing your kids. Instead you will just be shuffling them between activities as fast as you can manage and begging them for short bursts of conversation in between drive thrus and drop offs.

There will come a time where they don’t need you for everything and as they grow, so will their independence and their desire to be away from you—with friends, or playing Fortnite, or any number of things. As a toddler mom, you may be thinking, ‘Sign me up!’, but no worries, you are already on the list and headed that way.

You can’t slow it down, you can’t speed it up, but you can take advantage of every chance you get to date them—to actively pursue them and engage with them. To get to know them as individuals that are the same, yet so very separate from you. To not only love them as your kids, but as really cool humans made in the image of their Creator.

Some of these dates will be planned (like our really awesome trip to GO APE this past Fall) and others (like the one this past week for a haircut and ice cream) will be last minute and not so cool. But both experiences are well worth the time invested.