Stolen Moments

I love my children, I really do, but I love my husband the most. Last weekend, for the first time in forever, we got to be alone, totally alone, in the middle of the day. The boys fabulous Auntie Carolyn took them to the theater to see Cinderella, and Jonathan and I walked off alone. Free. We walked up and down the bluffs in Santa Monica, and stared out at sailboats and sun on the sea and the mountains of Malibu. We held hands and talked and allowed every tangent to follow to its end before returning to our conversational thread. We spoke uninterrupted for hours and hours. Then we spontaneously decided to get lunch at the Ivy, one of Jonathan's two favorite places in Los Angeles. We sat on the porch, peeking out from under the ivy. The sun streamed in, the air smelled like the ocean, and clean and clear after days of storms. The clouds were huge and puffy, like an Italian Tiepolo ceiling, not like Los Angeles. We sipped Ivy gimlets--o deevine--ate an exotic salad of papaya, shrimp, butter lettuce and avocado, and followed that with the world's best crab cakes. Then we held hands some more and walked back to get our boys. I love him. He is a good date.