Date Night is Incredible and I Wish I Had Babysitter Money!

It is Valentine's Week and love is in the air!  My husband and I celebrated early with a date night last Friday.  Madrina Stacy spent her evening with Myki while he and I ventured to Rockville, MD for "Painting and Pizza."  Our evening began at Visarts where we took the very loose interpretation of a painting "class."  The teacher essentially outlined the paintings for us, made some general comments on supplies and shading and told us to have at it.  Our final products were nothing museum worthy, but a good first attempt at art if I do say so myself.  (Maybe not first ever, but first since art was required in grade school!)

The evening then progressed to Oro Pomodoro, a delicious and surprisingly fancy Italian restaurant, complete with lots of born and bred Italians, for make your own pizza.  It was fairly simple - stretch the dough (thin in the middle with a thick crust), add tomato sauce, basil, mozzarella and Parmesan cheese (all of which smelled divine!).  It was a basic margarita pizza (named for an Italian queen - who knew!).  We each placed our pizza in the 900 degree wood-burning oven and two minutes later, they were ready for eating.  They were delicious and brought all new meaning to the words "made with love."

So much of a balanced family life is based in routine; all the new mom readings tell you so, and it really is true - children are impossible without habits.  Unfortunately, there is nothing sexy about routine.  So it's easy for my husband and I to feel like glorified roommates or co-babysitters.   Friday's date night was a reminder that we enjoy each other's company, that we are actually interesting, fun and funny people, that while routine is not sexy, we absolutely are! It's amazing how much you don't realize you miss something until you get to experience it again.

So why is date night so rare for us when it's so incredible?  Resources and circumstance have limited our opportunity.  I'm amazed I haven't read or heard more about the incredible cost of babysitters.  In the case of Friday, it would have cost me more to have a babysitter than to actually go on the date.  I mean my son goes to bed at 8 PM and babysitter's want to charge $100 to watch Myki for two hours and spend the majority of their evening sitting on my couch watching my cable.  In what other field can you overcharge to this degree?  I mean, I want to trust whoever is watching my son, and I want to pay them to do it...but I do require a bit more affordability.

It's an absolute case for living next door to your parents, or some family member who has an obsession with your child(ren).  When we lived in Florida, my husband's family was nearby, but they had lives of their own; no one was interested in spending their Friday and Saturday night watching a baby.  We absolutely got an occasional reprieve but nothing near the monthly or weekly dates a marriage deserves.  

Thankfully, we are slowly but surely working our way towards financial stability and hopefully, a babysitter/entertainment fund!  In the interim, we enjoy many an adult-only movie night, the occasional adventure with the help of someone's (like Madrina Stacy's) kindness and a running joke that if only we had a custody agreement with someone to take Myki every other weekend, we could get all the date time we needed!  (Totally kidding on this last point and not at all meant to offend any single parents out there - custody arrangements are rarely funny.)