What happy couple doesn't enjoy a date night? We certainly do, but when you have 2 small children and are watching your dollars we found we just weren't making it happen. My husband and I are both very committed to our marriage and making sure that we both stay that way so we realized that we needed to find a way to get a bit of time just for us. Before we had our second daughter we would ask our niece or my mother-in-law to babysit our daughter and we'd go off for dinner or dinner and a movie. As much as we enjoyed that we did not get excited about how much money we were spending for one little night out. Movies, dinner with a drink or two and appetizers or dessert, plus if it was my niece babysitting we always like to pay her for her services. We would always enjoy the night out, but not enjoy spending $150 or more for a few hours away.
Since we've had our second daughter we have found a new way to have a little date night. Its usually a Saturday night, and we feed our our older daughter supper and scoot her away to bed. Depending on the baby's schedule at the time we usually can scoot her off to bed too. Then we put in a take out order at a nearby restaurant and one of us goes to pick it up while the other tidies up from the day. Sometimes we sit at the dining room table and enjoy chatting and eating, or sometimes we just set up in front of the TV where we watch a movie that quite often I have gotten from the library for free, or we watch a video on demand, or from a little place down the street that rents super cheap movies. We always enjoy the anticipation of that time together, even if we are watching a movie and not talking a lot. We get excited about where we are going to get our food from and find ourselves talking about it all day. Being at home we don't need to pay a babysitter, can drink our own wine, and we don't need to tip a server. And I can nurse the baby when needed as well. How perfect for the stage of life we are at!
Please take note that there are potential drawbacks of the date at home. Take last night for example. We had picked up Japanese food, had it all spread out in front of us, and were watching "Bad Teacher" with Cameron Diaz. Our daughter had her many excuses not to go to sleep, and eventually ended up down with us for a snack. I didn't want to leave our setup so I put together a little snack for her and plunked her on the couch beside us to eat it and get back to bed. We decided to turn the movie back on in the meantime. Well, in those few minutes I think we exposed our daughter to more things that we have been trying not to expose her to than we could have imagined. I'm just waiting for her to use a few of the words she heard. Ugh. The entire interruption was short lived though, and we were right back to enjoying our evening... and even had something new to laugh about.
Can't wait for next Saturday night! (Cuz I'm assuming we won't have other plans!)
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