Although, it did come at the end of a grueling week, and admittedly everyone was tired and irritable, it was a successful date night! Double bonus, and completely coincedental, it was National Spouse Day!
Full disclosure: I was so excited for this date- but almost postponed due to exhaustion and a migraine- grrr! It ended up being a 45 minute date, but I just count it a win that we were able to have quality one on one time without phones and television! We even got a little intellectual. Sometimes that's hard because working all day and raising a toddler, my brain shuts off around 3:00pm :(
Here's what we did- with only about $10:
1. Snacks- maybe one day I will include a special dinner with our date, but right now that's just too much extra to plan for. And honestly, I can't wait until 7:00 pm to eat dinner. We usually eat the second Travis walks in the door after work.
We kept it pretty simple this week: just baklava and some wine, of course.
Note the grapes- just fake grapes I saw at the dollar store, that seriously looked to good to be fake. The looked fancy. Couldn't pass them up! Travis did offer to pay me $5.00 if I ate one, but that was not a risk I was willing to take, because who even knows what they are made of.
Another note on our snacks, from Aldi by the way. The baklava was absolutely delicious. The wine was absolutely terrible- would not recommend at all.
2.The Mood- Classical music straight from our Symphony Hall channel that comes with our Dish Network. Because January is Mozart's birthday month (today being his actual birthday) they were having a Mozart marathon. We also had a small gallery of several pictures Avery had "colored" throughout the week. This was my personal favorite:
3.Activities- We had book club! Had to pick a book we've both read recently, so we didn't have very many choices to pick from, but our family's favorite lately has been Phillipa Leathers' How to Catch a Mouse (or Catcha Mouse as Avery calls it).
How do you have book club with a children's book? I am not sure you can do it with every children's book, but this one had all the basic parts of a story, along with lovely illustrations (totally fair game for book club discussion, by the way!). You also need to have quality questions. I would absolutely recommend this blog post about "book club questions that work for any book." It even has a handy printable, so you don't need to do much planning before hand.
It was actually refreshing to sit down and have intellectual conversation with my husband (even if it was about childish material). There was no diaper talk, no work stories, and no business chat about what our plans were for the weekend, or the week to come. We had fun with it, without taking ourselves too seriously. I did, however, have an existential crisis in which I discovered that I am the mouse from this book while our daughter is Clemmie the cat, who spends much of her time looking for the mouse, eventually finding it hiding in the kitchen eating a snack. (Maybe that was too much self disclosure)
Next we painted! You probably expected us to make some kind of art, with a title of Arts & Culture Night. My original intention was to do a "Wine and Canvas" type of craft, but those supplies can be pretty expensive. (It's still on my radar though, so not ruled out for a future date.)
Instead, we stuck with a Dollar Tree craft. A win because it only cost $2 for the two of us to each make our own. With my husband in mind, I found these perfect sun catcher crafts, featuring a car!
This ended up being the perfect way to wind down after a particularly hectic week. What is better for relaxing your mind than Mozart, light conversation, and being creative? I know that sounds a little Jane Austen-esque, but they do have those adult coloring books for a reason: being creative is good for the soul! It reduces your anxiety by helping you to control your focus.
Thanks to those of you who have followed along with our journey so far. I would love to see if any of you are doing DIY dates, so please email me your stories or comment below. You can also follow along with my Pinterest board to see where I draw my inspritation.
