We have an actual babysitter and everything! When my wife gets home from work we'll be heading to dinner and then on to a movie. This will be the third movie we have seen in a theater since Yogi was born. The first was Black Swan and the second was Bridesmaids. Yes, we have wide ranging tastes. Tonight it will be Moneyball. I can't say that I'm thrilled about this, but it seems to be the best of the options we have and the folks at Rotten Tomatoes loved it. I'm sure it will be a fun night.
I think about things like date night quite a bit because in spite of my "parent of a young child" sleep deprivation and my general fuddy-duddyness, I know that carving out adult time for me and my wife is important. But in addition to rest of it, I'm also cheap (I'm quite a catch!) and the going rate for babysitters in our area is $12 an hour. Some of them even have four hour minimums! These are not the babysitters we use of course because really, four hours?!! That's practically 11 o'clock and I like to have been sleeping a few hours by 11 o'clock. But even without the hour minimum, babysitters are expensive and then you have to actually DO something with the evening which also costs money. So, alas it's something we don't do a whole lot of.
I imagine "Mommy and Mama time" will become more necessary and less possible when Monkey comes along. So, I'm thinking ahead. Even pre-Yogi my wife and I are pretty happy homebodies, so perhaps we could make the weekly stay-at-home date night work for us. Kind of like a "stay-cation". We can call it the "st-ate night". It's hardly catchy, but you get my drift. We could even hand off planning responsibilities from week to week and surprise each other.
- Picnics in the backyard (with the baby monitor)
- Fancy dinner prepared together
- Take-out from a favorite restaurant
- Movie and desert on the couch
Anyone else have ideas? I'm not that creative, so help me out. What do you do to make parent time at your house?
4 comments:
yes! we LOVE at-home date night! at least once a week, if not more, we put the kids to bed and have an adults-only dinner. it's so, so nice! and it doesn't have to be fancy at all - we can eat take-out or frozen veggie corndogs, it's just the act of sitting together and talking without anyone throwing food or screaming that makes it special! :)
The best we can usually manage is a bottle of wine after the little kids are in bed -- we used to love to cook fancy meals together, but by the time they are in bed and asleep these days, it is usually close to 9 and too late for dinner, much less anything fancy. I hear you on the babysitting fees -- we very rarely go out and when we do, we take advantage of family members.
I adore sta-ate night! Thank you so much for this idea! Everyone keeps telling us to get date nights in now while we can, but our favorite times together are at home, on a quiet night, with a nice dinner. I feel guilty about this all the time - like we're somehow failing? - and this feels like getting permission to enjoy things on our terms! (That said: three movies in over a year is pretty slight, so I hope you two enjoy the hell out of date night tonight!) R.
Hope you had a fun date!
Jen and I have gone out just a few times since The Bean was born. We have a date planned for November 17th, but no baby sitter yet! She suggested calling an agency (one that I've worked for, no less) but it is SO expensive. I'm hoping we'll be able to find another alternative.
We've been lucky that our little guy goes down early (knock wood) so we get to spend most of the evening together. Usually it just consists of dinner and a TV show on DVD. Having a movie night sounds like a nice way to pass some time. I don't know if you guys like board games, but playing Scrabble or Uno or something might be fun. You should post your ideas so that we can copy them!
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