Whenever my wife and I can’t figure out what we want to do on a special occasion, this one being our 5th anniversary, we go to a casino. I know this is wrong. Fortunately, we’re the world’s worst gamblers so we only play the slots and and we set a low budget for the amount of moola we can part with. Plus I had a room comp that was burning a hole in my pocket. So we dropped off the kid at great grandma’s, rented a Mazda 6, and zoom zoomed to Atlantic City New Jersey.

As expected, we didn’t win a thing, though we felt like winners all night. Why you wonder? Because Devin was 130 miles away. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, like a night away from the horrors of parenting. We don’t run away often, maybe once or twice a year, and it’s amazing. We do adult things, we do childish things, we do geriatric things, and we do them all without our take-along audience. It’s the kind of fun that only a parent can understand.

Now that I’m officially in my late twenties, a parent, and smack in the middle of family life I can appreciate the joys of an overnight with the wife. Knowing that someone else is out in the world getting cursed out by the boy as I enjoy a milk shake makes for a delicious drink. Understanding that I will likely not have filet mignon again the rest of this year (and that it will take me as long to pay off the meal) is priceless.

I may have lost $140 at the slots, but I won a teeny bit of sanity.