date night!!

I have been making more of an effort this year for Jason and I to have a regular date night. We all know how important it is to date your spouse, but with 3 1/3 kids and a mortgage, the dinner and a movie date nights of old don't happen very often! I have tried to get more creative and come up with things we can do at home or on the cheap and we've had some fun dates over the last few months.

So, in no particular order, here are some of our favorites!

1. Scooters on the Lagoon Trail. My mom gets credit for this one. Back when I was in high school and trying to figure out what to do on Friday/Saturday nights, my mom always tried to convince me and my friends to borrow our younger siblings' Razor scooters and go for a scooter ride. Oddly enough, we never did it. But now that I see how much fun my kids have on their scooters, Jason and I decided to try it! Last Friday night was a perfect fall night, so we borrowed Tempe and Helena's scooters and took them over to the Lagoon trail to enjoy the beautiful leaves. We got there just before a haunted 5k was about to start, so we got to see (and chat with) a few of the "haunts" as we rode. It was so fun! We finished up with dinner at Dickey's BBQ and "Tucker and Dale vs Evil" at home on Netflix (really hilarious spoof on "Cabin in the Woods" type movies--which are in themselves spoofs--but rated R for language)

 2. Chocolate tasting night. I saw this date idea on The Dating Divas (really great website!!) and it was so fun! I bought six different chocolate bars for us to taste--you're really supposed to get six different brands of the same kind (75% cacoa, for example) but I couldn't decide what I wanted, so I just got six different flavors. I set the table all fancy, we got dressed up, and after tasting our chocolate, we watched "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". 

3. No picture for this one, but with the leftover chocolate from our chocolate tasting night, we made fancy s'mores one night and ate them while asking each other thought provoking questions from slips of paper in a little jar (things like "What is your greatest fear?" and silly ones like "Pancakes or waffles?") The questions were because no matter how long we are married, I can always learn "s'more" about you! Cheesy, I know....

4. There is a store nearby with a "bomb shelter" in the parking lot that you can tour. Everyone who knows me knows that I am constantly scouting out places to survive the zombie apocalypse (I watch entirely too much Walking Dead), so one night we took our three little munchkins with us to tour the shelter and then watched "World War Z" after putting the kids to bed. Lame, but we've seen all the good zombie movies.

5. One day I took the middle seats out of our car, added a bunch of blankets and big cushions from our couch, and took Jason to a secluded parking lot to watch.... "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"!! on our laptop. We stopped at Habit burger beforehand to get some burgers, fries, and shakes, and then enjoyed our own private little movie theater.
Well, those are my top five dates of the past year. It's been really fun coming up with some ideas that are more than just watch a movie or play a board game--what are some of your favorite cheap/home dates?