Since today is Valentine’s Day, it felt only right to write something that fits the theme. Given that it’s one of the most popular nights for dates, it also felt like the perfect moment to explore an alternative kind of date night. My husband and I are parents to the most amazing son. He comes with some special needs and medical complexities. One on one time is extremely important and as much as my husband would love date nights out of the house, our life makes that difficult and they happen few and far between, so I have learned to improvise.
Whatever your reason is for not being able to leave the house for date night, making the time to have that one on one time is so needed, so here are some ideas:
Plan a special dinner at home.
We generally eat dinner at home, but when I am feeling like we could use something a little extra special, I plan a special dinner. This might look like eating something we don’t usually eat too often, dressing up a little for dinner like we would if we were going out, or maybe setting up some candles to add a little something special. My son is fairly easy to entertain. We can put on a movie for him while we take a moment to eat together. The only time he may try to crash dinner is if we have crab legs, which happen to be his favorite food.
Even if it isn’t a “special” dinner, we enjoy spending time in the kitchen cooking together. There are a lot of nights we both contribute something to a meal. Cooking together has become very enjoyable. I used to be very territorial over my kitchen, and sometimes still have my moments, but I have really come to love doing that together.
Work on a project together.
There is no shortage of projects that need to be done around our house. Even if there were, I’d come up with enough ideas to constantly add to it. My husband is extremely handy and can build almost anything. Oftentimes, we collaborate on various things. I design them and he makes them. A lot of times we end up installing them and finishing them together. I absolutely love being able to look at something and know we worked together to complete it. It makes the things in our home a little extra special and gives us the ability to be creative together.
Movie night.
On a normal day, the only time we have together is watching tv in bed after my son goes to bed. It is usually short-lived, ending in one of us falling asleep after a long and stressful day. Sometimes we plan a movie night in advance. We anticipate staying up later and watching something other than The Office while we fall asleep. We will pick a movie together and (usually) make it through the whole thing before falling asleep.
I’m going to add game night to this category. We aren’t big gamers, but I feel like that is a pretty common way to spend time together. Whatever your game of choice may be, set that time aside to work on a puzzle, play scrabble, etc. together.
Bonus: Doing all these things and including our son.
This isn’t technically a “date night,” but due to the needs our son has, oftentimes we have to include him in things. As he gets older, he wants to be involved more. As I said before, his favorite food is crab legs, so having a special surf and turf dinner usually ends up including him. He loves to help us with any projects we work on. He likes tools and has his very own set of (toy) power tools he uses to “help” us. He also has become very interested in helping us whenever we make things in the kitchen. During the snowstorm and the nearly two weeks off of school, we spent some time watching movies as a family and it was a very enjoyable time and made our son so happy. He truly loves seeing his mom and dad happily interact together.
