It’s Sunday morning and Pete and I are at Jack and Mary’s, our diner of choice.

We spent Saturday night celebrating a magical early Valentine’s Day by pretending to be grown ups. Dinner at Kres, followed by attending Celtic Women (my idea, of course) at the new Amway Arena. The sprightly Máiréad Nesbitt pranced around the stage with her fiddle as I leaned over to Pete and said, “I’m going to start doing that around the house.”

He laughed and replied, “We don’t have enough space for that!”

Maybe someday.

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Jack and Mary’s is so busy that we take a seat at the counter. I don’t like sitting at counters, because I feel like the people behind it are too close to me.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” I say to Pete as Nancy the waitress fills our sweet teas.

“Uh oh,” he says.

I love ridiculous conversations with him because they make him laugh, and this will be a good one.

“I think that we should buy a cat stroller for the boys,” I say, half seriously.

“You want a what?!”

“A cat stroller. You know, to take the boys for walks around the neighborhood. We could take them to the park and–”

“We are not doing that,” he interrupts. “I am not buying that for you. You are not going to become that crazy girl who walks her cats. Not in our neighborhood. Maybe if we move to a better neighborhood. But not this one.” Our neighborhood isn’t really unsafe, but it’s not that safe either.

“Well you won’t get me a dog, so what am I supposed to do?!” I reply. Joey found an incredible home but I really miss him. He was my lifeline some mornings. “I bet my mom would buy it for me for my birthday. I don’t care if our neighbors think I’m weird.”

I start to laugh and the hiccuping commences. It’s just what happens when I laugh too hard.

“I”m going to call her and tell her not to! You know, I have to negotiate something as part of my homework. I’m going to use this as my example,” he says.

I think about this for a minute, hiccuping still. “So you don’t mind telling your classmates that you married the crazy girl who wants to walk her cats, but you’re embarrassed for me to do it in front of the neighbors? I have to meet the people you’re in school with eventually. I don’t want them to think I’m weird!”

“This is all your doing,” Pete says, smiling. “You did this one to yourself.”

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It was the type of weekend that I thought real life would be like by the time I was 27. Dinners out and seeing shows or concerts when the mood struck us. Recapping the weekend over greasy eggs and hash browns with grilled onions and having ridiculous conversations.

Jack and Mary’s is doable on a regular basis, but the rest isn’t right now. I think that when you’re a kid, you have a naive perception of being a grown up. You don’t think about real life–the mortgage, a sick partner, a sick self, cats with impacted teeth that need to be removed. Friends who you love that will move away to be closer to family, making you realize that you might like to be closer to your family someday too if you have kids, so they can experience what you did as a kid.

But if every weekend included Kres and some silly show at the Amway Centre, we wouldn’t appreciate it. I wouldn’t spend the next day with my husband, eating eggs and having just as much fun as I did at Kres the night before. Because it’s not about the money or fancy places. It’s about being with someone who you can face each challenge with, no matter how difficult, and still have ridiculous conversations about cat strollers to make each other laugh.