Footsteps to sanity

In every marriage you have to connect with your spouse regularly in order to maintain a healthy and enjoyable relationship. By 'connecting' I mean sharing something other than housework, meal planning or parenting. Some couples organize date nights while others plan weekend trips together.

My relationship with my wife Heather involves footsteps, lots of footsteps. It's how we cope, how we decompress, how we share. Together we've covered many thousands of miles together (don't ask me to convert that to kilometres!). Without these footsteps one, or both of us may have snapped ages ago. Three kids will do that to you!

Another positive to this journey of a million steps is our dog Ozzie gets to come along. He doesn't interrupt, just sniffs and sniffs and sniffs. Beagles do that because the nose knows, you know?

Putting our best feet forward and our dog.

These walking journeys were not planned, we stumbled upon them by accident when we adopted our first dog, Webster, a Corgi. We couldn't walk alone with Webster very often as the kids were still too young. When Webster died Bronwyn was a newborn. Shortly afterwards we adopted Ozzie, our Beagle. A happy (and less destructive) Beagle is a tired Beagle so we walk him as often as possible. The kids are older now so it's easier to scoot out and let our teenager babysit.

This is good for us because without our walks our demanding, high energy 5-year-old and a very demanding, self-centred 13-year-old would have made us crazy long ago! Don't get me wrong, I love my children dearly but sometimes I need to get a way from them even if it's just for 45 minutes. Every now and then our 10-year-old son Tavish accompanies us on our walks because he too needs a break from the two girls!

There, that's my one and only piece of relationship advice. It works in our household, maybe it could work in your own.

Is there anything you do that helps your relationship? Let me know.