Love after babies looks like ordering pizza on a Saturday after the kids are in bed, and scarfing the pizza down because you just know someone is about to wake up. Then, finishing off the night watching New Girl together, finally succumbing to sleep at 9:30 pm. 

It looks like figuring out how to raise your kids as you go. You don’t really know what you’re doing, but you do know you’ll figure it out together. 

It sometimes looks like arguing about the same things over and over and over again. It looks like compromise, resisting the urge to keep score, and lowering your expectations. 

It also looks like giggling while you sneak Starbursts together behind the pantry door so your kids don’t see that you’re eating their candy. 

Love after babies looks like falling asleep next to each other and waking up in the morning with the dogs, and a kid or two, snuggled up between you. Your neck will then hurt for 3 days (ask me how I know).

It means suddenly needing to use one of those shared family calendar apps. You know the one. Every member of the family gets assigned a different color and you worship that thing like it’s the Bible, constantly checking and updating and passive aggressively responding to your spouse with, well did you check the calendar?

It looks like getting to experience loving someone through a whole new stage of life. It’s remembering what love looked like when you were teenagers, and now—how entirely different it looks after your lives were turned upside down with those babies you hoped and prayed for. There’s just something really special about watching your other half become the parent you always knew they would be.

Love after babies looks like forcing yourself to unload the dishwasher at the very end of the day, so the other won’t have to. 

It looks like complaining about the vacuum not charging right, only to notice it fixed without you even asking. 

Love after babies looks like teamwork. And it’s realizing, after all these years together, how great of a team you’ve really become. 

It means trying to have a simple conversation and constantly being interrupted by a kid jumping over the back of the couch or someone yelling mommy mommy, daddy daddy LOOK! It’s conversations that frustratingly and abruptly end because someone needs you, again. 

Love after babies looks like finally getting that rare night out together, and being able to talk about nothing other than the kids. It’s being smack dab in the middle of some spicy feta dip and asking the other, did you pay that bill/book that flight/switch that load of laundry? And of course you can’t help but open up your shared family calendar and discuss the preschool tour and that embarrassing thing the four year old said at storytime.

Love used to look like selfies with each other on adult vacations, hiking in Hawaii or drinking wine in Napa. A booze cruise in Jamaica and riding a tandem bicycle over the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s thinking, wow, we used to be so cool. 

Though, there are still plenty of selfies now—about 65 of them from just today, when the toddler got ahold of one of our phones earlier. 

It’s knowing you should put your partner first. You know you need to carve out more time with each other but the kids need a bath/the playroom exploded/someone is throwing a tantrum or throwing up. And you’re just so very tired. 

It’s wondering what on earth we did every night after work, back before our evenings were monopolized with bath time and picking up one million stuffed animals.

Seriously, are the stuffed animals reproducing?

It’s having someone to go through life’s hardest moments and heartbreak with. And when those hardest moments concern your kids, it’s a special kind of pain. A special kind of pain that only the other truly understands. And in a weird way, it brings you closer together. 

Love after babies takes much more effort and intentionality than it used to, back when we were newlyweds drinking wine on a couch that didn’t contain cheerios in all the crevices. Back when we had two lovely paychecks and a social life. Back before the baseboards were dinged up and we had a four year old that gets pee on the seat every.single.time.

We have to make more of an effort to connect now and to keep our relationship a priority. We have to do the sometimes difficult work of loving each other now, through this demanding, hard, and beautiful season, so that when the kids are grown and gone, we’ll still have each other.

Yes, love after babies is challenging and exhausting and (dare I say) a lot less exciting than it used to be. But it has also become more rewarding than I ever thought it could be. Sometimes I look at those little ones, the ones chasing each other through the house, shrieking with delight, and I can’t help but think, look at all we’ve done. Those little ones are and always will be, the absolute greatest pieces of our love story.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Love After Babies".