Date night... or not

Saturday night my parents kindly offered to keep our 10 month old baby girl and 2.5 year old son at their house. My husband and I decided that we should take advantage of this and have a date night.  Go to dinner, maybe watch a movie, not have to worry about the kids at all.  So gracious of my parents.  The kids usually do pretty well, but our daughter still wakes up at night sometimes.  Saturday, she ended up starting to get a stuffy nose and I was a little worried that she may have some trouble sleeping.  My parents still wanted to keep them for the night though and who am I to turn down a night of time with Mamaw and Papaw for the kids.  Or... a date night for my husband and I.

I don't know if this is true of you, but we have found that since we have had kids, we have had very few true date nights, with just the two of us. Maybe a couple or three a year.  So, this was a rare occasion!  For our date night, my husband and I decided to go to the Outback because we had a gift card there.  (Ah yes, the other reason we have very few date nights now, we are also on a much tighter budget!)  I dropped the kids off at my parent's house after lunch and came home, cleaned the house a little and then got ready.  We decided to leave as soon as my husband got home from drill.  That is typically between 4 and 5. This time it was around 4:30.  We went to an Outback that is pretty close to our house, so we got there shortly before 5:00.  It was funny, we felt like we were dining with the Early Bird diners.  Most of the people who were eating when we sat down were older.  We started joking about how 'old' we feel lately, with both kids being sick and missing sleep.  We had also both started feeling a little sick that day, so that just added to the 'feeling old'.  We had a lovely dinner and talked.  We got home and had planned to watch a movie. It was probably 7:00 or so when we got home and we settled down picked a movie and decided to watch it in our room, so we could lay down while we watched it.  Yeah, we were both asleep before 8:00!  Talk about feeling old.  I remember when we were in college and we would stay up until 3 or 4 studying and then get up at 7 for class.  Apparently, we can't do THAT any more!  It was still very nice to spend time together and to NOT have to wake up with the kids in the middle of the night!  :)  Thanks to my parents for the lovely break... maybe we can make this a more regular thing! ;-)