The Husband and I ended up having a weekend full of children, which I guess is good practice for two people thinking about having some of their own. But man, am I beat.

Our first foray into the small world happened Saturday, when we were invited by the Bro-in-Law and Sis-in-Law to watch their oldest play baseball. Apparently I assumed that the moisturizer-with-SPF I wore on my face would magically radiate to my chest and arms. I found out after an hour of baking time that this was not the case, and TH and I took his pink face and my fire-engine-shoulders home to recuperate.

The next morning, TH and I acted on our commitment to help out with the young children’s class at our church and showed up to a quartet of kids (our church is small) gathered around a folding table in tiny chairs. You should have seen the way the two boys’ eyes lit up when they saw TH, who to them appeared as a huggable jungle gym, and they began to climb as I sat next to the girls who were quietly coloring. The boys, whose hyperactivity was matched by their verbosity, then asked TH how old he was. “Thirty-two,” he replied, then they turned to me with the same question. I made the rookie mistake of asking them to guess, and naturally they offered, “Eighty?” The class’s regular teacher informed me that this was a compliment as she had been taken for ninety the week before, and my self-esteem recovered further when they re-guessed my age at twenty-five. Considering we were in God’s crib, or at least the community center that doubles for it once a week, I felt compelled to tell them my real age. “Thirty-three,” I said, figuring that was the end of it, then I saw the wheels in their heads turning and one piped up, eyes squinted in confusion, “But you’re older than him!”

Than he, I thought as I resisted the urge to correct a five-year-old’s grammar and TH laughed at the child-provided observation of one of the components of our relationship that he finds most amusing: my seniority. Within seconds, one of the boys asked TH, “Why do you laugh so much?” I considered the countless times I’ve been asked that same question in my life, another reminder of how our reactions to the world match up so well. Meanwhile, I glanced at the four-year-old girl next to me and she looked up at me and rolled her eyes, sighing, as if to say, “Such children.”

I kept watching TH as his comfort zone was repeatedly violated by a pair of boys he’s never met–boys who grabbed his arms and demanded seats beside him and leaned against him and hugged him–and he smiled through it all, grown-up kid that he is, wrestling with them and lifting them in the air and provoking generalized glee. And I realized once again, but in a new way, that before me stood the biggest reason I’d ever want children: so I could raise them with him. I know that, many days, raising kids will be a task for which we seem mightily underprepared. After all, we’ve grown quite accustomed to our “just the two of us” brand of life, our quiet times and our fancy dinners and our habits like grocery-shopping and gym-hopping that The Sis hears about and says, “GAH. You two do, like, everything together.” But I also know that, whenever they come, and wherever they come from, our kids will be so loved. And no matter how many we add to our roster, we will make one hell of a team.