is date night for us and has been for almost 20 years of marriage. Very little is allowed to interfere.

Try this as soon as you can, if it doesn’t make you recoil (everyone has his own style!) Take her to a store with toys. Buy a simple card game, something like Mille Bornes, something from childhood, anything easy to learn and play. Take the game to a local bookshop cafe, order hot chocolates or coffee if you drink it, and play.

Go to www.mylifestory.org. Sign in as a guest and take a look at their list of questions. These make great conversation questions.

If real together time is hard to come by, here’s an idea for in-between times. Buy a small bound journal. Write something in it, anytyhing-a question, joke, observation about your day, whatever. Hide it where she’ll find it, and tell her when she does she should write in it and hide it for you. The entries can be as short as necessary or as long as you have time for. We have a family “underground journal” which has been going for five years. Inside the front cover it says, “FIND IT, READ IT, WRITE IN IT, HIDE IT.” It’s full of my second son’s weird incomprehensible cartoons, funny comments by my third son, farvorite quotes and wry observations by my eldest son, things my little girl likes to do, all kinds of stuff-and my husband (who is not really demonstrative and doesn’t enjoy expressing himself) has even written a few serious, thoughtful, I-want-you-kids-to-know-this-truth kind of entries and a lot of goofy ones. To do something similar between a husband and wife would be a really valuable activity.

Time together is worth a lot. It’s worth making sacrifices for.

Thank you, my shohar joon. It would be so wonderful to spend more time together… It makes me so happy to see that it means this much to you also. =)

I cannot begin to tell you how much this means to me… all I can say is thank you, and yet that seems like such a small pair of words for how happy my soul is right now, just having read this entry. Insh’allah we can find more time… That would be so very wonderful.

::loves::

As far as decreasing spending impulses, I wanted you to know that there are a lot of books on that, especially those that explain why our society is structured to foster these compulsions.