Date Night at Home

Hey there, hi there, ho there!

Sometimes, it's hard to date your spouse! With the pandemic, everything was closed (thankfully that's not the case anymore and things are opening up). Throw any number of kids into the mix and date nights are nearly impossible. You have to get creative and a lot of times date night has to happen at home, or even with babies in tow (for me, especially!)

I put together a few simple ideas for when you are in a place in life where you can't exactly go out for a fancy night on the town.

1 // Game Night/Day

My husband and I LOVE games! We have a ton of board games and card games. There was a time when we played games that took an hour+ to complete, but in our new phase of life we have found some games we can actually complete before a baby wakes or while holding a baby (many of our date days have been interrupted with a baby who wants to nurse). If you are a bit competitive you will have a lot of fun with this one! You don’t just play board games either! We love having Mariokart tournaments, beating bosses in Super Smash Bros., playing through Halo together, etc!

Here are some of our current favorite board games!

2 // Movie Night

With Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Peacock, HBOMax, and more, there is no shortage of ways to watch movies at home! While this isn't a *new* idea, we always have a hard time finding a movie to watch. We can scroll through the movies for a straight hour before we decide. Here are my 5 favorites that we've watched recently!

3 // Make it Fun! Instead of just your basic movie or game night, add in something fun! This past weekend for our date night I made a sweet charcuterie board with our favorite movie theater snacks! You could do a regular charcuterie board, a sweets charcuterie board, a breakfast one, a fried foods board! Another way to make date night different would be to order out food from different places and have a sort of buffet. Order one thing from a Chinese place, some enchiladas from the Mexican restaurant, fries from your favorite burger joint, milkshakes from Sonic, and feast while you enjoy a new movie or fight to the death in Monopoly!

4 // Micro Date

This is not my original idea, but I heard it from some people on Instagram. Micro dating is finding small, in between moments where you can have a meaningful conversation with your spouse and just be together. This can look different for everyone. Perhaps it's coffee together on the couch before all the kids are up and asking for pancakes. Maybe it's a sweet conversation that happens on the way to pick up dinner. Maybe it’s spending time together gardening on the weekend. Whatever it may be, find a moment in your week where you two can just have a conversation and reconnect. It doesn’t have to be a big fancy date, it can be as small as a conversation while cooking dinner together. It just needs to be intentional.

What do you do to date your spouse? I'd love to know, as we are still working on this one!

Next week I will be sharing some thoughts on changing your perspective to find more joy. I hope you all have a great week, talk soon!