Eva Mendes says date night with Ryan Gosling "takes a lot of prep".
Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling
The 45-year-old actress has Esmeralda, five, and Amada, three, with her 'La La Land' star husband, and has said it can be tricky to organise a time for the two of them to enjoy a romantic evening together, because it takes days of preparation to make sure there are family members around to babysit their brood.
She said: "It takes a lot of prep. You got to prep it and make sure you have it all lined up. Luckily we have a lot of family support ... My family lives here. His family comes in, they live in Canada but they come in all the time and stay for a very long time, and it's very welcomed."
And the 'Other Guys' star says she and Ryan both find parenting "hard" at times, especially when it comes to putting their daughters to bed.
She added: "It's so hard of course. But it's that feeling of like, you know, you end your day, you put them to bed, and you know Ryan and I kind of look at each other like, we did it. We did it. We came out relatively unscathed."
Their evenings are currently made even harder by the fact their youngest daughter Amada is currently experiencing sleep regression, which is a period of weeks in which a young child suddenly wakes frequently during the night, after previously sleeping well.
Eva explained: "Nobody told me about [it] until I looked it up. Because I'm like why isn't my three-year-old sleeping?"
When they're not trying to get their tots to sleep, Eva and Ryan, 38, like to create a "playful environment" for their brood to allow them to grow and develop.
Asked by Access Daily if either of their children will follow their parents' footsteps into acting, Eva said: "Oh, I have no idea. Right now they have every bug - a lot of arts and crafts, a lot of painting. We have instruments around, they pick them up. We can't say they actually play anything but, you know, it's just a playful environment and it's a lot of fun, but who knows."
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