My husband and I are coming up on our anniversary soon. It’s been nearly 7 years and we still find new ways to celebrate us and keep things fun. We have started doing a weekly Late Night Date Night and I never realized how valuable they could be.
It’s simple: have a special meal with your spouse, after the kids go to bed one night a week or whatever fits your schedule. One week, I was feeling like I wanted a “fancier” meal, something to spice up our routine a little. With two kids under the age of 3 we rarely get a hot meal and I rarely even get to cook in peace. I love being a mom and having family time, it’s the best. But I know how important it is to have one-on-one time with your spouse.
As I plan out our meals for the week, I pick something a little nicer than usual. Nothing too crazy and it is still much cheaper than going out for a meal somewhere (and getting a babysitter). We pick one night that isn’t too crazy, usually a Saturday night. Then we will do any prep work for the meal while the kids are up playing. After the kids are down for bed, we head back into the kitchen and work on dinner together. We keep the meal pretty simple and not too time consuming. We turn the lights down low, Stephen picks out some music and we get ready for a nice meal together. It is amazing what a hot meal and some peace and quite can do for you. We also have a little dessert which we don’t normally have. We follow up the meal with something we don’t usually do like a new movie, comedy special, games, etc. We keep our devices off and just enjoy each other. While we watch TV during the week, it’s different to set aside this time and treat it differently. I’m telling you this is a game changer for us.
This can be changed to fit your schedule but basically, it’s about mixing things up a little bit. Setting sometime aside for your spouse and your marriage. I’m a huge advocate for date nights but in this phase of our lives, it’s just not feasible for us to have them frequently between the time, costs of dates, babysitters, etc. We’ve tried trading babysitting with other couples and it is great but schedules are so hard to coordinate, it’s difficult to get something consistent that works for everyone. Which is why we have gotten out of the habit of frequent date nights but these late night date nights have accidentally become my favorite part of the week. I look forward to it and can’t believe how valuable they have been for us.
I started a pinterest board to get some new ideas of new meals to try. All the recipes we’ve tried so far have been really great but I thought I’d share a couple of my favorites in the past couple of months:
- Pork Loin Steaks in creamy mushroom sauce with Caramelized Apple Tostadas – This was our first Late Night Date Night meal. I’m not a big fan of pork but my husband is so I thought I’d surprise him with something I’ve never made. This meal was amazing. I can’t believe how much we liked it, me for the pork and him for the mushroom sauce. We served it with mashed potatoes.
- Beef Wellington with Apple Pie Flowers (my creation I’ll be sharing here soon) – I’ve never even had beef wellington but it seemed like something different to try. It was interesting, probably not for us in the future but that doesn’t have anything to do with the recipe, just not our taste and it was more time consuming than I prefer.
- No Peek Beef Tips with Peach Scones and a Vanilla Glaze– We served this with mashed potatoes as well (a favorite of ours if you can’t tell). Delicious. I’ve never made baked scones only the fried kind of scones. These were surprisingly easy and super tasty.
- Perfect Filet Mignon – Filet Mignon is a bit fancier than we usually go. It was well worth it though!
- Creamy Fettuccine Alfredo (recipe coming soon) and Apple Sauce Cookies – Alfredo is something I miss with my lactose sensitive husband but I’ve perfected a simple recipe that doesn’t have any cream or cream cheese in it. Not 100% lactose free but something my husband can handle. It is so so good and my husband approves so we all win. Finished off with my favorite family cookie recipe and it was a great meal.
Have you ever tried anything like this before? What do you do to keep date nights and special time for your spouse or significant other, tell me in the comments!
Jenn Langsdale says
My husband and I did this for a while, but we’ve really gotten out of the habit. Thanks for the reminder that we need to make date nights a priority! 🙂
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