Date Your Mate #1: Lost Cities and Vacation Planning

Several months ago, I read about SimplyModernMom's Project 52: Date Night. The idea is that you carve out some time, an hour or so, on a weekly basis to spend time with your mate. It doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't!) be elaborate or expensive. The point is to plan, be creative, and take the time to be together.

Matt and I did a brief trial run back in April or something and I think our timing was off and it didn't stick. Matt was out of town a lot and I'd been in deep at work as well. Excuses for sure, but sometimes you just have to accept that it isn't going to work out right now.

Now we're giving it another go. We've been feeling disconnected lately, torn this way and that by our frequently separate daily routines. We almost always come together as a family in the evenings, but we are busy tending the kids, getting dinner on the table and the maintenance of daily life.

Our plan is to have a 'date night' for at least an hour, on Tuesday and/or Thursday each week. We will alternate weeks planing them. We've deviated a bit from the norm because we're throwing a second day into the mix. One day (usually Thursday) will be our fun-date and the other, if it happens, will be our business-date. If we can only have one date, fun it is, but there's always tons of business we can put off and the point is to unplug and enjoy spending time together, talking and interacting, even if we're doing something theoretically mundane. I may or may not blog about the business-dates, but I plan to blog about the fun ones for sure. Our first business-date was last Tuesday. Our project was to organize our California trip. We sat down with the laptop and booked a car rental, looked up Disneyland admission prices, tons of activities and made a rough itinerary. It really got us both excited for our trip and put a few things in motion that we might otherwise have left until too late. We also started thinking about other trips we'd like to take.

Matt was in charge of our inaugural fun-date night (take 2). He purchased a game called Lost Cities from Amazon. It is a really simple game to learn, but one of those that you can play over and over relatively quickly and never get bored. We did three rounds of the game and after the first I declared to Matt that it was definitely “his game” (he had over triple my puny score) and then came back to win the three rounds after a very successful third round. We both enjoyed learning a new game and one that was just two-player was very fun for a change.

This week we have agreed to do a bit of organizing for our business-date and I have no idea what Thursday will hold. I guess I'd better figure it out!