As most of you know, Nate and I are toddler parents. Gabe is our life! However, getting out for a date night isn't always on our list of priorities, even though we would like it to be. Are you a toddler parent too? How often do you get out for a date night with your significant other?
Nate and I are so fortunate to have his parents nearby. They LOVE to babysit Gabe. When they aren't available, we have some great teachers from Gabe's school that we can reach out to. Yet, we still don't get out very often. In fact, we're homebodies and totally okay with it.
That's why when we stumbled upon
Date Night In Boxes we were pumped! We tend to be creatures of habit and our lives are busy so most times we love to just sit on the couch together with a bowl of popcorn. Having a curated date with no pre-planning necessary was super appealing. It's also a refreshing way to mix things up and break out of our routine.
This date night was amazing. We got a menu with simple, delicious recipes, step-by-step instructions for fun activities to do together and even a Spotify playlist to play in the background while we had our date. Best of all, we were able to do this after Gabe had gone to sleep for the night, no babysitter needed!
We jumped in with meal prep. Honestly, Nate crushed this all on his own. We wanted to get ready for each other and break out of our joggers and hoodie routine, so while I got ready, Nate prepped the meals, then we swapped and I plated everything. We started out with a blackberry mint cocktail (it could also be made into a mocktail), dined on an entree of farro with fresh pesto and veggies, and had lemon cookies for dessert. Everything was DELICIOUS. We made a few tweaks to the recipes (we used vodka instead of limoncello for the drinks and got vegan pesto from Trader Joe's instead of making our own), but we stored the recipe card for safe keeping to use in the future. They are definitely recipes we'd like to revisit.
It was a beautiful spring night here in Central, PA so we decided to have dinner outside. Date Night In provided us with a candle for the table, so we lit the candle and queued up the Spotify playlist and sat down to dinner. While we ate we started the guided activities. The first activity was table talk. In the theme of let love grow, we talked about the different stages in relationships. We read the descriptions out loud and discussed whether we thought our relationship was currently in that stage, beyond it, or if it would be a stage we would get to in the future. It was fun to talk about the past and exciting to discuss our future.
After dinner we moved inside to finish our activities. First we planted our own basil plant with the kit we received in the box. We're super excited to watch it bloom and grow on our windowsill. Then we did our relationship timeline. This was all about the future. We rolled a die and whatever number came up we would discuss what we wanted for our relationship in 3 weeks, 5 months, 6 years, etc. This activity was tougher than we thought it would be. Sometimes it's hard to think that far in advance for me. Nate wasn't much better, so we took turns. A future Disney trip and more baby Glockes found their way onto our timeline.
We ended our night with a game and our cookies! Our Night In Box came with dual sided cards. One cards had questions designed to bring people closer together. The other side was a regular set of playing cards. Some of the questions were silly and others were very serious. I loved doing this activity with Nate. It definitely was great to talk about all the things, and now we have a sweet new set of cards to play cribbage with (does this make us old?)
Overall we had a blast, connected and talked, and enjoyed ourselves and all of the activities that were provided. We are looking forward to our next
Date Night In Box!
