Big Sister Moments

We are watching my niece, Addy, tonight. We took her to church with us, and she was sitting in her car seat next to Nora in her car set. Since Addy is forward-facing, and Nora is rear-facing, they can see each other quite easily. Addy was smiling at Nora, and Nora smiled back, and Addy started giggling and told us that Nora likes her. Which got me thinking about the interactions that Danielle and Eleanor would have...

I often wonder what interactions Danielle and Eleanor would have had, how much Danni would smile & giggle with her little sister. Would she share her toys with Nora, or would she take toys away from her (like I did to my brother!)? Would she clamor for attention while I was trying to feed her sister? When Nora was a little older, would they sit together, tell silly stories, and giggle & laugh? Would she give her little sister kisses? Would she try to comfort her when she cried?

I guess I will never know...

Date Night: March

I think I'm going to try to do a "Date Night" series. I debated on if I should put it on this blog or my other blog since I want to show how little we pay on date nights. I don't really have a reason why I chose this blog, but I did. I wanted to share our date nights (which goes more with this blog), but also give you ideas on how you can save some money too (which goes more with the other blog). So let me give you a little background...

Before Children (we'll call it BC), Adam & I would always have time to talk over dinner, gaze into each other's eyes, and be as romantic as I can manage to pull out of him. After Danni, we still had that time together, having our daughter, didn't really change anything, unfortunately. But once Nora came along, dinner talks turned to listening to our daughter babble, trying to get her fed between our own bites of food, scrambling to put dinner away and getting her off to bed, so that we could collapse into bed ourselves. Think there was any time for me to try to squeeze out even a drop of romance from Adam? (Just in case you're not sure of the answer, it's a resounding NO!)

Enter Date Night.

Granted we haven't had a date night since before Christmas (December 1st to be exact), but our goal is to have a date night every month. And being that I am a SAHM (stay at home mom) right now, and he's working two part time jobs while going to school full time, we need our dates to be cheap. So here's what we did...

First off, we are lucky enough to have my parents live super close, and they are always willing to babysit for us to have a date night. So our "babysitter" for Nora is free. Second, each Christmas we get gift cards from Adam's family for different places (stores and restaurants). One of the gift cards that we got this year was for Outback Steakhouse. When we order, we keep the gift card amount in mind, and try to keep the total close to that. But we don't mind going a little over for a tip. I usually order a water, but Adam usually orders a pop. Last night, Adam ordered a burger & salad, while I got pasta (without the chicken option). Since Outback offers bread with garlic butter before the meal, we both ate a lot of that (we actually ended up getting three!). That helped fill me up, and I brought home half of my pasta. We ended up paying $2 cash for dinner (and a lunch for me later!)

Then we went to Cub for dessert. We were going to also get a movie from RedBox, but opted for a movie off Netflix instead. For $4.01 we got a tub of mint ice cream, and brought it home. I spread out a blanket on the floor and grabbed a couple of pillow from the couch. We cuddled up and watched Chaos Theory on Netflix.

Since my mom had put Nora to bed with a bottle, Adam drove over to pick her up, while I pumped before we all went to bed.