Dating My Husband

Marriage is hard. Marriage after a baby is harder. Steven and I had a really amazing talk the other day. One of our "takeaways" was that he felt we were more disconnected after Felicity was born, while I felt we mostly struggled with baby related things, where as I feel more disconnected now, and he feels we're mostly struggling with baby/toddler related things. I find it fascinating that two people living the same experience can have completely opposite feelings on it. Just goes to show how different we are as humans with unique personalities and perspectives, and how important it is to communicate. My neighbor and friend recently told me that she and her husband have an "unplugged" date night once a week. In a time of our lives where dates outside of the house are rare to nonexistent (Clare doesn't take bottles), I thought this was a fantastic idea. Especially since Felicity is going to bed a little later, Clare is a bit of a wild card, and by the time they're both down, we're so exhausted that we both hunker down to our computers happy to not think or talk to anyone for the rest of the night. Well, that may be relaxing but it hasn't been great for our marriage. So we decided to jump on board this unplugged date night. I found the unplugged part so important because I could see us easily picking a movie night many weeks which, while fun, isn't really face to face time. I wanted to be sure we were really interacting. We've decided to take turns planning it each week and it has been fun to do and also a lot of fun to plan! We did this early in our marriage as well, except the dates were out of the house. But we took turns planning and it had to be something new each week. It really helped us get creative and branch out, and was a ton of fun experiencing something together each week. Anyway, I thought I'd share our first 3 weeks in case anyone is doing the same thing, or wants to, and might need ideas. Thankfully pinterest has quite a bit, too!

The first week was my week and we decided kind of last minute so I put together some games for a Game Night. I didn't want it to be all board games so I reached back to my youth to think of some things. We played "dots" (where you have a sheet of dots and take turns drawing lines, the last one to connect a line to make a square gets to initial that square, whoever has the most squares at the end wins), hang man, and one card game. I planned for us to have a word search race, but I left the word search books in the room with a sleeping Clare so that got cancelled! We had some snacks and talked while we played, and it was really enjoyable!

Steven's date night was next. For the first part, he decided we'd sit on the porch and talk. Honestly, I was kind of thinking we'd spend a lot of time just sitting. Lately we suck at conversation because, like I said above, we're just so tired at the end of the day. He said he would look up some questions if we needed to. But we didn't! We sat on the porch for almost an hour, by the light of a citronella candle, and just talked. The conversation flowed to the point that we lost track of time for the second part of his date! He had bought 2 Dollar Tree journals and had us each write a page of a story that we made up, then switch journals and write a page based on what the other had written, then switch again. It was fun seeing how differently our stories started out, and frankly being a bit ridiculous together.

This week was back to my turn and I decided to be a bit more creative. I settled on a carnival theme and had a lot of fun! I made up 5 activities: ice cream sandwich sundaes, face painting, kissing booth, animal ring toss, and tossing balls into a bowl to win a goldfish (cracker). I made signs with pictures for each activity and hung them around the living room and kitchen so we could make our way through the 'carnival'. Besides the fact that the cat jumped up beside me and puked during the kissing booth, it was a ton of fun. My favorite activity was face painting. I'm not artistic at all but it was a lot of fun! And we realized we're both very ticklish with a paintbrush near the corner of our eyes, so we used that to torture each other during painting. We enjoyed it so much that we ended up both painting each other's faces twice. And ice cream... I mean, how can you go wrong? The date was a bit faster than I thought, especially for having 5 activities, but neither of us minded since we'd had so much fun. I wonder what Steven has planned for his turn! 

Does anyone else do this? I'd love to hear date idea if so!