August Date Night Jar

I mentioned in our anniversary post that I gave David a date night jar for our anniversary, so I thought I'd share a little more about it and share the dates we did this month.  I might not share about it all year, but we had fun coming up with the list and getting it going.

Here's our jar!  It has different colors for different categories.  We have:

1. At Home Date Nights that don't need any prep (Red and Purple)

2. At home date nights that need some preparation (Orange)

3. Out and about no prep or planning needed {and can be done with Cooper in tow} (Green)

4. Out and about prep/planning/babysitter needed (Yellow)

We created the list together our anniversary weekend and assembled the jar.  It ended up where we have about 12 each of orange (at home planned) and yellow (out planned) sticks, so we decided to draw one of each of those at the beginning of the month so we can make plans as needed.

August's dates.  We didn't get a green in with being gone on vacation, so we'll have to catch up this fall!

Well, neither of our planned dates really panned out exactly like we had originally thought.  In place of a ropes course we were going to do parasailing in Orange Beach, but it got cancelled by the weather.  There are a few ropes courses here, so we may do this one at a later date, but it didn't happen in August.

And the idea of a Chopped Challenge came off some different lists I'd found, but then when I started to plan one I realized how terrible it sounded for us.  Neither of us are creative or good enough in the kitchen to plan a meal with no recipes and a box of ingredients!

So I put a different spin on it.  I decided we would each pick a recipe and shop for the ingredients independently and then plan a night to cook together, but the other person wouldn't find out what we were cooking until we were in the kitchen together.  So not really a Chopped Challenge, but still lots of fun!

We planned it for Saturday night, but when it rolled around I actually was not hungry at all.  I went to a movie and a late lunch with friends on Saturday, so the thought of eating didn't sound appetizing at all.  So we actually ended up only making David's recipe.  He picked these World's Best Peanut Butter Bars.  We actually had most of the ingredients already on hand, even a few he didn't realize we had on hand and bought extra of.

Mixing up the dry ingredients

The chocolate frosting did not turn out well for us so the bars didn't have that, which was fine since that would probably have been David's least favorite part.  He also didn't read that you were supposed to let them cool before putting the layer of peanut butter over it, so we ended up with some melted gooey peanut butter on top, but that definitely isn't a bad thing!

We decided to draw a purple stick for an activity for the evening.  

We played a round of Trivial Pursuit and a few rounds of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire while we waited for dessert to cool a little.

David enjoying the world's best peanut butter bars!  It was a fun and different date night for us and we really enjoyed it!  Our other at home activity was a night sitting outside together and we enjoyed that earlier in August.  

Even though we didn't follow the plans exactly, the jar has been a fun way to do something different a few times a month and not just fall into our TV and Netflix rut!