Project 52

I stumbled on Project 52: Date Nights on Simply Modern Mom. Tiffany and her husband decided to take on a year-long project to have weekly interesting but low-pressure date nights. Their constraints were a little different from ours -- they have young children to work around, but could have at-home dates once the littles were in bed. We have just the one teen who is often away from home, but there's no having a date night when she's here. We might be able to afford a little more now than when we were in their shoes (grad students with young kids) but we have the same issues of "We are too busy. We can't think of anything to do. The house is a mess. We are tired." Blah, blah, blah.

So, armed with 52 weeks of ideas from Simply Modern Mom and some simple rules:

• Can't do the same thing more than once in the same month. This means going out for dinner can only be the date ONCE a month, instead of being the only thing we can ever think of.
• Take turns being in charge of date nights on a monthly basis. This will relieve us of the endless attempt to reach consensus, which always results in us going to a well-worn restaurant or ordering take-away and watching tv.
• No children allowed. With only 3 people in our family, it always seemed a little mean to go out and do things without Frances. But hey, she's 16 now and goes out and does plenty of stuff without us!

we will undertake this Project 52! 

(We'll leave for another time the topic of why all of the role models I seem to be finding online are under 30 and LDS when I am neither of those things. Talk amongst yourselves.)