We’d blasted through the first part of the ‘take no prisoners’ approach to parent-teacher conferences, which had us cramming visits at two different schools into a single evening.

The promised hordes of parents queueing up in lines to see the high school teachers hadn’t yet materialized at 5:30 pm - and we’d resolved to only try and visit three of my son’s teachers. This meant that by strictly adhering to the ‘five minutes per teacher ONLY!’ rule, (and just a little bit of waiting), we’d accomplished part one of our evening by 6 pm - well ahead of schedule.

That left us with an hour to kill before we needed to be 15 blocks SE for the girl’s scheduled conference at her elementary school - time enough for a quick dinner. So we ducked into a nearby Quizno’s, and settled down over sandwiches to catch up. The conversation flowed freely - we had plenty to talk about, even though we chat via email or phone frequently. In fact, we looked like a couple. Not a couple still in that early thrall of mutual fascination, of course.
 
But one who was intimately familiar with the other person - a couple who still had a fair amount of synchronicity going on. In fact, we had the clerk who rang us up totally fooled - she did a bit of a double-take when I insisted on separate checks at the register. Before you know it, we jumped back in our separate cars to head down to Part Two of parent-teacher conferences, where I once again did most of the talking for us both, and apologized afterwards for not letting him get a word in edgewise. His response? He’d not only agreed with what I had to say, but appreciated the additional insight he’d just gotten about both kids. Even though we email and talk frequently.
 
We strategized about how to handle next steps with the teen (the short version? get it together, kid, or life gets difficult for you.) Talked about the Thanksgiving morning handoff and possible weekend agenda. The bottom line? It’s the best ‘I got lucky’ dinner date I’ve had in quite some time…! Even though we went back to our separate cars and headed home to our separate houses…