Your First Proper Night Out Since Having Kids

Sort the childcare first and treat everything else as detail. The night itself is easy, and you will slot back into it inside two tunes. What trips people up is the four hours beforehand: the handover, the guilt, and the phone in your pocket. Deal with those properly and you get an actual night off rather than a supervised one.

An afternoon start makes all of this simpler, which is why so many people come back this way. With Dreamworx you are asking for a shorter window, at an easier time of day, and you are home at a normal hour.

Do the Childcare Before Anything Else

Book it before you book anything else. Not the same week, not "I'll ask my mam nearer the time". The date goes in with whoever is having them, then you say yes to the day out.

Ask for more hours than you need. A four o'clock pickup that drifts to six is a stressful afternoon. Ask for the evening and hand them back early, which is a much better problem to have.

What It Costs

Be honest about the full figure, because the childcare is often the biggest line and people leave it out of the sums.

• A sitter, if you pay for one. Rates vary locally, so ask around rather than guess. Family costs nothing and is worth repaying in kind.
• Getting into town and back. Both legs. Put the taxi money aside before you spend anything else.
• Drinks and food. A meal beforehand, drinks across the afternoon, something on the way home.
• Nothing new to wear. You own something that works and it will look better than anything bought in a hurry.

Agree the number with whoever you live with in advance. A day out that has been budgeted for is a day out you can enjoy without doing arithmetic at the bar.

Write the Note

Ten minutes with a pen saves an afternoon of texts. Leave one page on the kitchen side with the things that are genuinely not obvious.

• Tea, and where it is.
• Bedtime, and the bits of the routine that actually matter.
• Any medicine, allergy or thing they will not eat.
• Your number, one other number, and the doctor's.

Then say out loud that you are not expecting to be rung unless something is actually wrong. That one sentence is what lets you put your phone away.

Agree the Finish Time First

Decide before you go what time you are home and how you are getting there, and tell everybody involved. Not so you can be held to it. So that nobody at home is guessing, and so you are not making transport decisions at the end of six hours.

Pick the time you actually want rather than the earliest one you can justify. If you have organised the day, take the day. Coming home two hours early to prove something helps nobody, least of all you.

Say it to the group as well. In a big group there is always somebody trying to talk everyone into going on somewhere, and it is far easier to have said "I'm off at nine" at two o'clock than to be having that conversation on a pavement seven hours later.

Phone On, Phone Down

Keep it on, keep it loud, and put it in your pocket. Checking a screen every twenty minutes will not make anything at home go better and it will absolutely stop you being where you are.

Take your photos early, in the daylight. Send one message when you arrive and one when you set off home, and leave the rest of it alone.

If the guilt arrives anyway, and it often does around the first hour, give it a job. Go and dance to the first flashback you hear. A flashback is a proper oldskool tune, the sort that draws everyone on to the dancefloor, and one of those does more for you than an hour of talking yourself round.

The Morning After

This is where an afternoon out earns its keep. Home at a sensible hour means a real night's sleep, which means you are a functioning parent on Sunday rather than a shape on the sofa.

Plan the morning anyway. Get things ready the night before, and if you can, agree that whoever did not go out does the early start. Then swap it round next time, because there should be a next time.

That is the actual goal here. Not one big night out you talk about for two years, but getting back to going out as a normal thing you do a few times a year. The first one is the only hard one.