Two Saturdays ago, I tore off my shorts dirty from the afternoon of yardwork and dressed up in my standard date night outfit – sparkly shirt, jeans, and large earrings. We drove to a very Jersey restaurant a few blocks away and had large glasses of wine and a plate of mussels at the bar. We texted Jonah to see how he and his brother were faring at home. It was a date night.
Truthfully, Steve and I don’t have too many date nights. We have lots of excuses. The weekends are packed with family events – soccer games, extended family bbqs, a trip to Yankee stadium, kiddie birthday parties. Babysitters charge $15 an hour and are unreliable. Grandparents have lives of their own. The kids are just as hungry for Steve-time, as I am.
But things are changing. Jonah is able to babysit, and both boys are perfectly content to spend an evening playing video games without hassessment from grown-ups. We don’t feel comfortable ditching them for too long, but a couple hours at a local restaurant is very do-able. We are going out tonight for more wine and mussels.
A friend and her husband both work and both travel frequently for their jobs. They have complicated schedules during the week, managing the many babysitters and trading off dinner-duty. Still, they schedule a date night every Saturday night. She said that she and her husband hardly have a chance to chat during the week, so they need those few hours to re-connect.
With everybody working a million hours, sometimes we feel torn between the kids and the spouse. Who is the priority? Does Saturday night belong to the kids or to the spouse?
Do you do date nights?
Apt. 11d 
We often walk the dog together. It’s less expensive, less calorie-laden, and the dog is pretty happy. 🙂
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Like Wendy, we’re dog walkers too. On some Tuesday evenings, we take in a movie because of a weeknight discount. We do the food shopping together, first going out to an inexpensive dinner then work it off walking the aisles. I call it, Dinner ‘n a shopping cart. I think the urban version is tagged, Fork ‘n cart.
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No, for the same reasons as you, including the kids needing dad (and dad needing kid time) time just as much as I do partner time.
I’m wondering if date night is easier to schedule if one parent isn’t spending more time with the kids than the other. The kids with other caregivers a lot, including for date night sounds a bit like the Downton Abbey style of parenting. If you have systems in place that involve other caregivers, extending the parenting time away to include couple time might be more logistically feasible than when one of the couple is the main caregiver.
I do see this changing as the kids can hang out by themselves, giving us time to ourselves. We’ve been able to go out for lunch dates (while the kids are at school, when the work schedule is flexible enough). The kids get annoyed when we go to restaurants they like, though, so we should search for more variety.
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Couple time is extremely important for my hubby and me. We start to bicker too much and get irritable with each other if we don’t get enough of it – which is not how we prefer to live. We schedule a date night at least once every 2 weeks; and about half of those time we double date or meet up with our couples dinner group or couples wine group. This past February for the first time, and again in May, we dropped off the kids (ages 5.5 and 3.5) with their grandparents for a week so we could take international trips just the 2 of us.
We also do a quarterly childcare swap for an entire Saturday with another local family who has same-aged kids. Taking care of 4 kids for a day can be less working than just taking care of our 2 – somehow they cancel each other out, and it is fantastic to have an entire day of free childcare with no kids in the house.
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We were doing happy hour every Friday for a while–then the kids moved from being old enough to stay home by themselves to being old enough to have a Friday night social life that requires us dropping them off and picking them up at inconvenient times or supervising guests at our house. I guess the next step will be kids old enough to drive themselves, but I kind of hope that step never comes. I will be too stressed to enjoy my nights out. (Two high schoolers have died in car accidents in our area this spring).
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We don’t do date night but we often do date lunches if my schedule at the university allows. Mike works four nights a week and often goes out to play tabletop games with friends another night, so the remaining dinners are family occasions!
Chances for dinners out will drop off drastically in the fall, in any case. We’re really going to miss our built-in babysitter when Eldest goes off to university in the Big City Down South come September. Autistic Youngest can be at home by herself for half an hour or so but she’s really not “aware” of herself and her surroundings enough to do so for longer.
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I’m with Lisa. We don’t go out now because we’re usually having to keep tabs on a teenager. A teen just died this week in a car accident, and another died about a month ago, very close by. As some of my friends with seniors said, “We basically want to bubble wrap our kids.” So we’re too distracted to do date night on a weekend. But we have coffee together every morning, and on weekends, that’s a couple of hours of time together usually. At least teens sleep in. 🙂
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We hired a babysitter to come every single Friday night for several months. It was the best thing I’ve ever done. Now it’s summer, and she’s got an internship, and I’m not sure we’ll be able to get back to date night. But goodness, I sure hope we can. We had such a blast.
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