Date Night

at a friend's "30th" birthday party

Date night has become very important to my marriage. I notice it mostly when we haven't had one for a while. We are more rammy with each other and tend to become selfish and inward focused. It's always hard to get a date night in over the holidays because it's so busy and money is tight. Now that we've gotten back into the swing of things, date night has become regular again.

Thursdays are my husbands day off. We usually reserve Thursday nights for our date night. My husband is in charge of finding a sitter (which is so nice!). He can usually find a parent of a middle-schooler or high-schooler that will volunteer (for free) to watch our kids since he spends a lot of time with their kids. It's really nice that we don't have to worry about that. All I know, is that my husband is in charge of the sitter and that has been a huge blessing! We'll tell the sitter to arrive at 6p but we don't get out of the house until 6:30ish because we're visiting or the boys are finishing dinner, etc. And we are home by 10p. It works out really nice.

We usually don't spend a lot of money when we go out, but I do love to go out to eat on our dates. We have a few "tricks" to save money at restaurants:

Subway - split a $5 Footlong, no chips, water
Fazoli's - split a baked spaghetti, split a *FREE side salad with the use of our Super Savings cards
El Azteca - free chips and salsa before the meal, split and entree or order ala carte
Taco John's - split a combo meal
Applebee's - split a burger meal

There are probably more, but those are places we frequent the most.

Here are some of the things that we do after we eat:

disc golf *free (when it's warm)
drive around and talk
walk through the mall without our wallets
go to a dollar movie
walk through Target or WalMart and pick up items we need
stop by Target for a bag of popcorn then get a Redbox movie and go home early

Again, there are probably more, but that's all I can think of.

Our date night started when we had our first son. Before kids you spend a lot of time together because there are no big distractions at home. After kids, you need to make your marriage a priorty over the kids which is so hard to do. Our oldest was born almost 6 weeks early. I had been in the hospital for almost 3 weeks before he was born. So, while he was still in the ICU, my husband took me out for dinner. We were only gone for an hour or so, but it was the start to putting our marriage first. It was hard leaving our little man in the hospital, but my husband knew that I needed to get out of there for a while. Since then, it's become our norm. Thursday night is date night. We don't go to any sporting events, we don't hang out with students, we don't double date, we take time for ourselves. To reconnect and to work on our marriage.

Do you have a regular date night? If so, what do you do? Any frugal tips?