Je suis sexy et je le sais

Date Idea #3: French night! Spend the evening together learning how to speak French.

As much as we'd like to go out every single date night, it's not always practical- especially with a kid. We can't always find (or pay!) for a babysitter. That is why I included several at-home date nights in our dating jar. This is one of them.

Dave and I have always been interested in French culture. When we met, he told me that he wanted to move there one day and I am all about that! We're thinking of settling down in the Palace of Versailles. We've also tried to learn French before, but eventually slacked off and forgot about it. So when we pulled this idea out of the date jar, Dave was really excited to do it.

The way I suggest to do this is to go to your local library and rent a "listen and learn" language kit. They are so easy to use and it helps to hear and repeat the words that you are trying to learn. So Dave and I went to our local library and it sucks. Not one single listen and learn kit there. Good thing we have iPhones! We found an app that taught us French phrases and vocabulary. Then it would give us quizzes on the words that we had learned. It was fun to try and speak those foreign sounds and then help eachother on the quizzes. And it always helps when you spend your entire date cuddling under a Snuggie. But the most fun we had was probably with Google Translator (which is just found on the internet, not our phones). We would type in English phrases and it would translate them into French for us. We thoroughly enjoyed the French translation of the song, "I'm sexy and I know it".

In hind sight, it would have really added to the French night if I had made a French dinner. Oh well. Feel free to improve and/or add your own twist to my date ideas. Gear it more towards what you and your spouse would enjoy. That's what makes it fun!

Park Hopping

Date Idea #2: "Go visit Fountain Place in downtown Dallas"

Have you ever explored downtown in your city? I used to think it was just a bunch of of

fice buildings and relatively boring. However, I was amazed to find out about all the sites there are to see in downtown areas. Dave and I are very fortunate to live smack dab in the middle of two big ones- Dallas and Fort Worth. This particular date idea pointed us to Dallas.

I got this idea when I typed into Google, "Free things to do in Dallas, TX". 123432 results popped up. I ended up sifting

through them for a couple hours and found quite a few good ones. I suggest doing the same for your hometown, but just be warned-

look carefully at the ideas you find online, a lot of them are not actually free. And you don't want to spend time planning a free date only to get there and

find out it has a $15 entrance fee. Now, back to our downtown date:

Fountain Place is actually an office building that happens to have a beautiful scene surrounding it. There

are fountains of water with trees planted right in the middle. There are tables where you can sit, have lunch,

and just relax amongst the waterfalls. Dave and I had brought food for a picnic (saves you from spending money eating out), but it was far too cold to eat outside. So we had our picnic in our car. You may call us lame, but we were significantly warmer and happier in there.

The one downer to Fountain

Place is that it only takes a few minutes to explore. However, we spotted a downtown directory and located a couple of other parks we wanted to

visit. We call this park hopping. One of the parks had gigantic Christmas ornaments that we had fun posing with.

But our best find was definitely the last park we went to. It reminded me of Central Park in NYC. Beautiful landscape, with lots of trees, hills, and stone architecture. There was

one hill where you climb stone steps to the top. When you reach the top, there are chairs, tables, and even a well made of stone. Dave and I had a lot of fun pretending to be king and queen of that realm. It was an amazing find, we never would have guessed anything like that existed in downtown Dallas. So check out your downtown area- you might be surprised at what you find too!

UPDATE ON MY NEW YEARS RESOLUTION: An unanticipated event occurred. My husband is leaving on business for the next 3 months. 3 months=12 dates. He leaves in 2 weeks. So in order to make up for the time that he's gone, our goal is to go on as many dates as we can before he leaves. This is really easy for us to do right now, since I'm not in school and super busy yet. So, can we fit 12 dates into two weeks? We'll find out soon!!

S-C-R-A-B-B-L-E

Our first date of 2012!

Here was what we pulled out of the "Date Idea" Jar:

"Go to a local cafe and play Scrabble. Choose a character that you want to act out and be in character while you play."

So we hit up Starbucks. The deal was that as soon as we walked through those doors, we were new people. I chose to be Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation. That's easy enough: just be super happy and perky and make things awkward sometimes. Talk about parks and voting a lot. At first, Dave pretended to be deaf, but then admitted later "Ok, so I'm not deaf, I just don't like people." Hello Ron Swanson.

As it turns out, we are both TERRIBLE at

Scrabble. I think during the entire game, we only had 2 words that were longer than four letters. At one point, Dave's letters made up the words "TO OBAMA", but I wouldn't let him use that because it was a name. I also have to admit that towards the end of the game we got a little tired of being in character, so we quit the Leslie and Ron act. We instead decided to act as a cute married couple playing Scrabble on their date.

It may sound simple, but this was actually a great date! It's true, this is something we could have just done at home on any old night. But sometimes with dating, all you really want is to get out of the freaking house. Going to Starbucks, away from dishes and kids and bills, added an element to playing normal games that made it a terrific date. And no, we did not purchase anything at Starbucks, so it was 100% free!