DATE NIGHTS: WHY IT’S SO IMPORTANT

When we decided to try for our first, everyone told us to take our time, travel, date each other, leave the house spontaneously, leave town spontaneously, enjoy the peace and quiet you have now, enjoy the energy while you have it, no need to rush into it because once you have kids blah blah blah… they weren’t wrong. Although heavily engrained in our brains, we never truly realized how our lives and our relationship would change once the baby came.

Now that are kids are old enough to stay at home with the sitter with no issues, my wife and I started to do “Date Nights” again. Almost every Friday, we put the kids to bed, call the sitter, and leave the house for a few hours. We either go to the movies, dinner or both. Movie date nights are especially exciting if there is a movie out that we want to see. I get real excited when a new horror movie comes out that I want to see…my wife just rolls her eyes and comes anyway.

It’s so important to have these nights because it really does give us sometime to decompress from the insane week; with me at work all week and my wife at home with our son constantly cleaning, feeding, changing, running after him, picking up our daughter from school and doing it all over again for her. It gives us a chance to also reconnect since we’re both off doing our thing for the majority of the day.

For a long time, we really were not able to do these date nights because the kids were so small and so attached to us we were afraid of them waking up in the middle of the night crying which they did on many occasions.

These nights are not easy to have with two kids and responsibilities especially during the week. This is something that takes some effort from both parties; you have to want to have these moments to yourselves just to escape even for a few hours. As parents, we always put our kids first before anything, and in doing so we often times forget about ourselves and our well-being. It’s only normal. However, if we don’t take care of ourselves and have these moments of escape, we’ll be exhausted, drained both physically, mentally and over all not in a good place. That could be detrimental to your relationship with your partner and your kids. That is why these date nights are so important. So don’t forget about yourselves, don’t forget about your needs and wants because they are very important. You don’t have to do anything extravagant, a simple dinner will do just fine. Trust me, you deserve it.