One of the goals I mentioned in my last post, was having at least one date night a month with my beautiful wife. This goal stems from a lesson I learned over the last 1.5 yrs. Let me back up a second. My wife and I have been married for almost 4yrs. I’ve learned a lot about marriage during our first wonderful few years. We could have a date night at a moments notice. In hindsight, we didn’t take full advantage of this opportunity. Then our beautiful little girl, Baby G, was born. Now I’m the process of learning how to be a father and still maintain the romance in our marriage. Which seems to be much easier than said for me. I had good intentions of scheduling date night multiple times, but it never got prioritized (shame on me!!) So, this year we have budgeted $50 a month ($600/yr) for date night, which could easily pay for dinner and movie. I would love to have budgeted more, but I plan to go into full detail of our 2008 family budget at a later time.
Does anyone out there have good examples of being successful at balancing romance and fatherhood?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Tim Wilson // Jan 31, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Going on 14 years of marriage…with three kids…and you’re on the right track!
Tip 1: Watch movies at home — not on a date night. You’re often paying for a sitter when you go out, so the meter is running. Dinner plus a movie is a good 4 hours, which can get pricey. Plus, at a movie, you’re interacting with the big screen rather than with each other. Occasionally, we’ll hit places like Alamo Drafthouse (simultaneous dinner AND movie), but, more often than not, when we do get out, we’ll hit a couple of restaurants — appetizers and drinks at one and then dinner at another; preferably close enough to each other that we get in a nice couples-only (no kids) hand-holding walk in.
Tip 2: In-home date nights work. We occasionally set a date — 2-7 days out (no sitter required!) for an “in-home date night.” We feed the kids and get them to bed (or, sometimes, put them down in front of a movie — their TV time is sufficiently restricted that they turn into zombies when it’s turned on) and then have a nice dinner, bottle of wine, and conversation. A key is that, on in-home date nights, there is no computer and no TV time allowed ALL NIGHT (otherwise, the temptation is too great to flip one one “after” the date is over — the date shouldn’t end officially until sunrise the next morning)
Tip No. 3 — local overnight getaway. My mother-in-law visits often enough and for long enough periods that we don’t feel like we’re not getting time with her if we leave her with the kdis for a night. When we were in Austin, we could make a trip to San Antonio and an overnight stay on the River Walk for fairly cheap and still only be gone for ~20 hours. It was great, and, thanks to Priceline, surprisingly inexpensive. And, related, we’ve done “flight required” trips when we’ve gotten someone to stay with the kids for a couple of nights — but waited until a couple of days before the date and then just found the cheapest fare we could to any old city. That wound up being an amazing weekend in Philadelphia over the 4th of July one year (and we’re about to do it again next weekend…no telling where we’ll go!)
2 mrlifelesson // Feb 2, 2008 at 10:40 pm
These are great date night ideas. I appreciate your comments. Keep them comming. I hope you enjoy your date weekend next week.
Leave a Comment