ABC Date Nights (Inspiration and "A")

Date Night Inspiration


It had been a long winter.  We were bored.  Bored with winter and bored with each other.  In addition, thirty years together had made us complacent about our marriage.  My life was no longer crazy busy running children to and from, no bedtime stories to read, no school lunches to prepare....not even a kid in college that could use a package from home.  Hubby was quickly morphing into a work by day, couch potato by night machine.  Seemingly endless days of snow, ice and cold along with "nothing to do but watch TV" dragged on....and on.  We decided we needed to make a few changes.  We were SO distressed we had actually resorted to mall walking just to get out of the house for awhile.  It was during one of these 'mall walks' that we had the brilliant idea to reinstate Date Night.  Not a novel idea---but we both knew we needed a jump start of sorts--we needed to learn how to have FUN together again.  To make it more interesting we decided to use an ABC theme and take turns planning our date nights.  We would begin with a date idea that started with 'A' and then planned to work our way through the alphabet until we got to 'Z'.  All that was left was to flip the coin for who went first!  I was the lucky (?) winner and so ABC Date Nights began.  

  Our first date night started about six weeks ago.  As I later discovered, most of the vowels will fall on my turn and by most I mean ALL.  After some quick calculating I also discovered I will get 'Q'.  Oh, it's definitely going to get interesting. 
I actually had a few ideas for 'A' but ended up with Antiquing.  (Special thanks to Beautiful Daughter #2 who gave me this idea!)  The challenge, for me, was to come up with going somewhere that fit our time frame.  Most antiquing places require a bit of a drive and our date night is on a weekday.  I found a place and--BONUS--it was pretty new---we had never been there before!   This was no small feat as any antique business anywhere near us Hubby has been at least a hundred times before!  We were pleasantly surprised to find a new Antique Mall that was the perfect size and had plenty of booths for us to explore.  We spent about an hour there and then headed out for dinner.  We were happy to find delicious wood-fired pizza in an amazing array of varieties!  It was wonderful to get out of the house and enjoy time together.  No TV definitely makes for better conversation!  In addition to a pretty good start to date night, we also had found our new favorite pizza place!  All in all, our 'A' date went well and best of all, we were motivated to press on!