Date Nights

Natalie joined us on our date night last Friday.  We went out for some Thai cuisine.  Luckily it hasn't seemed to make her milk supply too spicy.  During the dinner this little third wheel didn't make one peep.

So nice of her.  Have I mentioned that she is perfect?

Corey and I try to go out on a date once a week, most often on Friday nights.  We're pretty good at keeping that commitment to ourselves.  We made a dating resolve when we were living in Chile.  Story goes as follows - after moving to Chile, we called to check in on some friends in Costa Rica who we knew were struggling with various things and we caught them out on a date.  They had money, work, and car struggles, a large family to feed and many things to worry about, but their marriage was strong.  After Corey got off the phone with them, he said "Well if they are making date night a priority in their hard circumstances, we don't have an excuse" and like I said we'd been pretty good throughout our marriage at trying to go out regularly, but this made us make sure that date night and time for us was a #1 priority, like everyweek.  Even if it's just for popsicles or something simple.  Just a little bit of time together.  And going out on dates in Chile is one of my favorite memories of when we lived there.  We lived pretty close to a big mall, so we'd be able to laugh and talk as we walked over.  I think walking over was my favorite part.  The restaurant dining was good too, but mostly it was just spending time catching up with and talking to my favorite person in the world.  That's my favorite memory of Chile.

When we moved to Virginia and before our own kids were old enough to babysit, in an effort to reach out and meet the new people in our church, I asked some moms who had the same number of kids as us if they wanted to do a sitting swap.  They took me up on it, and so we'd babysit for them on Friday, then they'd babysit for us on Saturday.  Three families did it with us, so we were able to work around most schedules for ourselves.  It worked great, gave us time to go and see things in DC and stuff, it was awesome.

Now we are lucky cause we're a couple of years into the stage of parenthood where our older kids are our babysitters, makes it a little easier on the family budget.  But even when it was tighter, I'm grateful that Corey shared and has helped us apply this advice that his parents received when they were married ~

"If you only have a dime, spend 5¢ on bread, 5¢ on flowers."

Great advice.  :)