The Long Road to Seduction

In any marriage there comes a time when you have to work a little harder to keep the spark alive. It isn’t easy with all of the competing priorities we have nowadays. Let me tell you how a night of seduction goes in an established household with 2 kids, a dog, professional day jobs and crap that always needs to get done…

After a typical morning of getting the kids off to school and lamenting on how they make us hate them every morning while trying to get them out the door, my husband decided to stoke the fire early with a special text message. This technique comes highly recommended from many internet articles with titles such as “8 Ways to Get in the Mood” and “Turning Up the Heat in Your Long Term Relationship” but I’m sure those authors envisioned the “heat” going a lot more smoothly than it went in my household.

So, I’m game with the early morning text message and ready to play along.  The text came with special instructions to be ready and waiting, sans attire once the day was done and all responsibilities were complete.  To those of you without a household of children, this in itself may seem comical that we are pre-planning sex AND it has to occur once dinner is over and dishes are washed and baths are given, etc.  Isn’t the point of this exercise supposed to heat you up so you can ravage each other the moment you reach the house? The anticipation building on the way to the front door? Well, yes. But when you’ve got too many things to do every night and kids around, this is a very slow burn with a flame you’ve got to protect for a good 10 hours. By now, I know the drill so I’m still in it to win it.

We both go about our respective work days, while I continue to refer to my racy texts for mental inspiration for the coming evening. I work from home so let’s be real, most days my shower time is noon, unless I want to get a noon run in and then shower time is about 1:00, but this day I worked through lunch, super busy, and didn’t get to it until 3:00, thinking, He can’t come home and find I haven’t showered yet! That will totally put out the mental flame! I rush to shower and dress and then get back in the office to prep for a 4:00 meeting.  It’s only after that shower that I realize, I probably should have shaved my legs. No time now!

By 5:00 when I’m off work, the REAL race to the good stuff begins. I’ve got to feed Sydney something filling enough that she’s not starving during gymnastics from 6:00 to 8:00, but yet not so heavy that she falls off the balance beam due to bricks of food resting in her belly. After dropping her off, I race to Home Depot to finish getting the extra garden bed and soil needed to complete my garden as I have plants at home anxiously waiting to get in the ground before I travel for 3 days. I rush home and he’s now home, on the couch taking a post-work nap while I get a quick 40 minutes of work done in the garden, all while trying to will myself not to sweat or get dirty. Only standing shovel work. I should be fine.

At 7:40 I rush to to pick up the kid and rush back home to get her a final meal because she’s always hungry after 2 hours of gymnastics. Spaghetti O’s. I’m on a mission today and I don’t have time for home cooking. Yes, I fed my child canned Spaghetti rather than cooking her something because my mind was focused on specialty sex. The super hot, movie-style sex takes serious commitment when you’ve got kids running around most of the day. Rushed her to make her lunch. Rushed her to shower. She’s screaming from upstairs that she’s out of clean underwear. My husband is running up with the basket of clean clothes. Rushed her to bed.  Missed a call from my mom who left a voicemail that sounded serious. “Rae, call me back. There’s something I really need to ask you about.” Called her back. Opined on her issue, which is NEVER as grave as her voicemail tone indicates. Then, I scooted up to my husband asking, “Is it time now?… Wait… do I smell ok? Do I really need an extra shower?” Eyebrow raised, he leans over to sniff me and just walks away with a twisted face. “Don’t give me a face. I need a yes or no.”

He looks back at me over his shoulder, “You smell…. earthy. I can smell the outside on you.”

Really? I was only out there 40 minutes and didn’t get in the dirt! “Fine,” I say as I head up for another shower and he yells, “But hurry up because I’m sleepy now!”

How sexy!  I ask, “Should we do this another night?” because I want the high quality fantasy scenario laid out in the text from earlier. I’ve been working toward this goal all day and we are too close to give up and have sleepy sex! He rallies and says he’s up.

I rush up the stairs and hop in the shower, trying to rid myself of the mental intrusions of parenting and housework so I can solely focus on what’s about to go down. I get out and realize I forgot to shave my legs, AGAIN. I rush down the stairs to grab my new shipment of Cream Blends body butter that just came in because if I use enough on my legs, at least it will kind of glue the leg hair down for a bit. Sprinting down the stairs, I’m screaming, “I’m not ready yet! I need my cream!”  He suggests he’ll just come upstairs now.

“No! That’s not what you laid out in the text message. I want the scenario! Just give me a few more minutes,” I plead. I didn’t shower multiple times and stay in the mental sex zone all day to NOT get the pre-texted fantasy night!

I rush back upstairs, slather my legs to glue down the leg hair, text him that I’m ready now and try my most seductive lounge on the bed. Wait, there are unfolded clothes all over the lower 25% of the bed.  This isn’t sexy. I hop up and just push everything off the end and tuck it on the floor just beneath the foot of the bed. I try to smooth out the covers to make it look nicer because no, we don’t make our bed every morning. I flop back in the bed, constantly changing how I am sitting and laying, trying to get the sexiest look. On top of the covers or under the covers? I am no good at all with sexy poses or faces. I mean, I am the WORST.  Every time I try to look sexy, I look mean or constipated. I can only imagine what face I finally settled on when he walked through the door. I tried my best to look as if I hadn’t been practicing my casual sexy, come-hither lounge.

He tells me to lay on my stomach for a massage first. Yippee! He gives the best massages! Then I hear him rummaging around. “What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Did those kids squeeze out all of the body oil in the couch?!”

Let me explain. A few weeks back he gave me a foot massage on the couch and left the bottle on the floor. The kids came right in after us and some child had gotten to the oil and left it ON the couch, where the bottle, without the top fully closed, got squished down between the couch cushions and squeezed almost completely out, soaking the underside of the cushions with lavender oil. Now every time you sit on my couch, a puff of lavender scent pops up around you. Thanks for the aromatherapy furniture kids.

“Its over there. And look! There’s a little left. Let’s make it work!”

It was a LOT of effort to keep the enthusiasm for a finish line that ended up being 12 hours away.  And after all of that… It was TOTALLY worth it!