On Saturday, March 15th, we officially started our Date Night/Babysitting exchange with our friends Gretchen & Larry (and their kids, Brandon & Julia). In order to keep a healthy relationship with your spouse, it's highly recommended that you make the time to have alone time (Date Nights). I once heard that although our kids are the biggest priority in our lives, especially as a stay at home Mom, it is essential to still always make your spouse your 1st priority. If you don't nurture the relationship with your spouse, you hinder your family relationship as a whole. So with that in mind, we set out to make a change. As a family, we spend a lot of time together, doing a lot of activities that we all enjoy together. The kids go everywhere with us, because fortunately they have the temperament to be able to go everywhere with us and enjoy the things we do as well. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave for much one on one time, which is to our own fault. We have our occasionally monthly Poker Nights with a handful of parents like us, which allows us about 4 hours of adult companionship. But that is not a real date night. Date night is one on one time, and is not supposed to include going to the movies. It's not easy to get a babysitter, in our case family (since we have yet to pay for a babysitter) to watch the kids on a regular routine basis. Date nights are recommended once a week, but that's not possible with our schedule and situation. Fortunately our friends Gretchen and Larry are in similar predicaments and after discussing our options, we agreed that we could try out alternating Date Nights and Babysitting. It works out even better because their kids our close in age to our kids and therefore play well together.
We started the rotation Babysitting (we were supposed to do a Date Night the week before but the kids were sick, so we cancelled, it happens). In about a week, we will be going on our first Date Night Exchange, let you know how that goes. Our babysitting night went well without any problems. We only pray that our kids will be as good when they are at their house.
We are pretty excited to at least have this opportunity to increase the amount of Date Nights in our schedule. Although it may be once every other week, it's still much better than what we had before (none at all). If you are a parent out there with a similar situation and don't go out on much date nights, try finding another family and see if you can work out the exchange. Family is very important, but don't forget to keep the strength in the foundation of your family, you and your spouse!
Click below to see photos!
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