Friday, January 30, 2015

Project Date Night: January

As promised, a grim look at my good intentions and date disaster. Ok, so it's really not THAT dramatic. Although, my camera's still busted, so no pics on this post. M got a replacement part though so I hope to have pics against soon!

My plan for January's date was to continue the Hobbit theme we started with our Christmas Eve T-Shirt Tradition.  M is a big Tolkien fan and his birthday is in January, so I thought we'd do a Hobbit themed 2-part date to celebrate his birthday.

Here's what I was supposed to do:

photo credit: the dating divas
On New Year's Eve, we were supposed to stay up late and do Dating Diva's Hobbit Date, with the following menu:
Hobbit Stew (beef stew)
York "Shire" pudding
Elvenking Cobbler (berry cobbler)
Bag End Brew (iced tea)
Treasure (Peanut Butter truffles and Lemon truffles wrapped in gold foil wrappers)
Dragon Jerky (beef jerky)
Ring Cookies (coconut flour cut out cookies)

Then, we were supposed to take the "treasure" (snacks) with us to M's parents' house (where we were headed for the weekend) for the second half of our Hobbit extravaganza  - tickets to see Battle of the 5 Armies in the theatre.
 
Here's what I actually did:
  • I made Paleo lemon truffles.  They were really good. So good, I had a hard time staying out of the fridge.  I kept wanting to snack on them.
  • I burnt the ring cookies because my brain was totally on hold and I forgot they were in the oven.
  • I didn't get to make the Peanut Butter truffles because I took too long with everything else. 
  • I was planning to make homemade jerky, but forgot a few weeks ago and ate the beef, so no beef = no jerky and also no Hobbit stew. 
  • M requested a cheesecake for his birthday dessert at his parents' house, so I made one here before we left. My thought was, I'll skip the cobbler since we're having cheesecake tomorrow. But, the cheesecake was terrible.  I mean, really terrible. 
  • At that point I ended up saying, "FORGET IT!" and skipped the rest of the menu altogether, ate the remaining lemon truffles and went to bed early.

Fast forward 2 days. We went to M's parents' house and I bought more ingredients for cheesecake and actually nailed it. I can't have dairy or eggs, but everyone else seemed to enjoy it. I also made chocolate bark for me and that came out wicked yum.  We decided to go to the movie on Friday night for the 7:20 showing, which worked out ok, except we were still full from dinner, so we didn't actually snack on the nut mix I brought.  That's probably ok. We had a snack back at the house.

The movie was good. "Very epic", M said. I agree. Really didn't feel like 2-1/2 hours - the action kept it moving. And it was nice to get out without the baby.

So, we had a fun movie date, although it wasn't quite as extensive as I'd hoped.  Oh well. M didn't seem to mind.  Isn't he a keeper?

Monday, January 5, 2015

Project Date Night

Happy New Year, everyone!!  I decided not to do "resolutions" per se this year. Instead, I'm going to do a monthly post on a date night in order to keep me accountable.  Spoiler alert: January's date was a fail... not to epic proportions, but let's just say it didn't go as I'd planned. Stay tuned for that post, if you're interested.

I've said a lot on this blog about the importance of dating your spouse. I still believe that! It does, however, get exponentially harder to do when you have a small child at home (especially if you're nursing), and we've been very lax about dates this past year and a half.  Some families in this situation choose to forego couples only dates and do family outings instead, but I feel that we already do enough family outings and want to make sure M and I get some alone time once a month to connect as adults and spouses, not just parents.

So, Project Date Night, here we come.  Each month, I will post about what we did for a date that month.  Some will be an activity or date "out", some will be a simpler activity or date night "in". Some will be expensive, some will be frugal. Some will be successful, some will flop miserably, I'm sure.

So bear with me!  While I'm doing this more for us than anyone, I do hope that my readers will gain some fresh date ideas to use in strengthening their own relationships.

Here's to building better marriages, one date at a time!
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