24 hours on Cloud 9
The one-day parent date is a slice of heaven when you’re short of me-time — and Sophie White knows how to avoid the baby withdrawal symptoms
Motherhood is a very annoying catch-22. When you are with your kids 24/7, you’re always plotting your next escape. Things that were formerly tiresome chores, such as trips to the supermarket, getting the car NCT-d, or anything involving a recent bill and photo ID, all become attractive pockets of potential me-time. However, when we do manage to snatch more than a few hours away from the adorable parasites, we invariably find ourselves missing them. Deeply irritating.
In the last year, Himself and I have perfected our patented 24-hour parent date, and it’s been a roaring success. We divest ourselves of spawn around 5pm, and hit the town early, so that we are tipsy by seven, and home and snoozing by 11pm. This affords us a solid night’s sleep and plenty of time the following day for a lazy breakfast and indulgent hangover behaviour — something that, at this point in our parenting career, is as much fun as the ‘hitting the town’ portion of the date.
Paying someone to mind your kids while you’re basking in a hangover is the height of luxury. And 24 hours, I’ve found, is the perfect holiday from family life; I don’t want any longer than that. Recently, I had to go away for four days, and while I loved the undisturbed sleep and freedom to laze about without anyone demanding I wipe their bum, the whole thing was marred by a persistent hunger for the sticky embrace of my children, with their chubby, satisfying-to-squish little bodies and delicious baby-smell — mine weirdly
“In my delirium, I hit upon an amazing business idea: baby petting zoos; like the cat cafes in Japan”
kind of smell like Chickatees, and I love it.
By the time I was on the return leg, at the baggage carousel of Dublin airport, I was ready to seize any passing baby just to get a whiff of their head. I basically had the DTs, having been without my baby-head fix for days.
It was during this delirium that I hit upon an amazing business idea: baby petting zoos. A place where you can go and cuddle random babies of all different ages.
As I stood waiting for my bag, barely restraining myself from making a lunge for a nearby three-month-old in a pram, I thought about how the baby petting zoo could also work really well for those of us who don’t want any more kids, but occasionally need to cuddle tiny babies in order to scratch any residual biological itch. They could be like the cat cafes in Japan. The only potential road block I can foresee is that people can be weirdly proprietorial about their babies; we may have to come up with some kind of Jurassic Park-style solution to breed the babies.
With breeding on the brain, I had a craving for eggs. Cloud eggs have ruled Instagram lately for good reason. They’re delicious, and worth the mild faff required to make them.