Why Tori and Dean Don’t Like Date Night

While most parents with young children are typically counting down the days until their much-needed date night, Tori Spelling insists she and hubby Dean McDermott would rather stay home and take in all the chaos than spend an evening away from their four children.

“I want to enjoy every moment because I feel like every parent, the one thing they say is: ‘Oh my gosh don’t blink. It flies by,’” Spelling tells omg!. “I’m madly in love with my husband. He’s in love with me. We have the rest of our lives together. I just want to enjoy these precious years where we can be with the kids all the time and they love it.”

The 39-year-old made headlines last year after announcing she had become pregnant with her fourth child just six weeks after giving birth to her third, daughter Hattie, now 16 months. (Her family already included son Liam and daughter Stella, now 5 and 4 respectively, and McDermott’s 14-year-old son Jack from his first marriage, who lives with them part time.) She then shocked fans again when it was revealed that she had been diagnosed with a condition called placenta previa during her pregnancy with Finn, had been at risk of losing the baby, and secretly spent four months in the hospital on bed rest. It was an experience that she says has changed her outlook on life.

“It definitely taught me to kind of slow down and relish in every moment and to be in the present. I’m such a workaholic, but I want to be a completely hands-on mom, so I spend my life just making sure that everything gets done,” Spelling confesses. “So it threw me off because I had to just do nothing while I was in the hospital before he was born. It kind of made me realize that, wow, life is so precious and fleeting and you’ve got to hang on to these moments because you never know what’s going to happen.”

And that includes not anticipating that you’ll ever be the mom of a brood this big. Case in point: When she and McDermott, her husband since 2006, took a family photo for the Hollywood-focused coffee table book The World According to Wonder, a few years back, they had just two little ones. By the time the book – which features pics of hundreds of celebs and was put together by World of Wonder, the production company that produces Spelling’s reality shows – had been published, that number had doubled.

“I’m so devastated that two of our kids aren’t in the picture!” she exclaims. “It’s so funny. I keep looking at that picture and thinking it wasn’t that long ago and yet it was so different in our lives.”

And in case you were wondering if more kids are on the horizon, the answer is no.

“I think Finn loves being the baby and this was his way of telling us he wants to be the baby for good,” she shares. “So I think we’re good.”

These days, the Spelling-McDermott household – which consists of Liam, 5; Stella, 4; Haddie, 16 months; and baby Finn, who will be 6 months in a few weeks – is proudly self sufficient with their own backyard farm complete with vegetable crops and fertile chickens.

“We’re a very DIY family. We spend a lot of time at home and make everything ourselves, which I think is a great thing to pass on to the kids,” Spelling explains. “We have a certain celebrity lifestyle but we make sure that at home the kids have responsibilities. They’re very aware of living off your own means and I think that’s an important lesson to teach them. So we try to balance it that way.”

To be sure, Liam and Stella understand that their family is a little different than those of most of the other kids at school, and that there are people called paparazzi whose job it is to take their photos.

“Their normal is ‘Oh, OK we see ourselves on TV. Or we possibly could open up a magazine and there could be a picture of us … they know that that’s part of their lives.”

But the former “90210” actress has no qualms about the fact her kids are growing up in the spotlight like she did.

“I know we’re here to ground them. And I think that’s what’s important at the end of the day,” says Spelling, who adds that her parents, iconic TV producer Aaron Spelling and wife Candi, did the same for her. “My parents were actually very grounded. We might have lived in a not-so-normal circumstance compared to other people, but we had a very normal lifestyle within our lives, if that makes sense.”

One part of that “normal lifestyle” included a vegetable garden just like the one she and her family have today … albeit the one at Spelling Manor was a lot bigger.

“People would probably be shocked to know that Aaron Spelling, on any given weekend, would be in that vegetable garden with his shirt off and a pair of shorts and sneakers and he would be like picking the food and taking it in and shucking the corn,” she shares. “He actually did do that.”

Kind of hard to picture, but we’ll take your word for it, Tori!

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