Project 52 Date Night #1

So we kinda already have a leg up with the date nights... let me explain
A very good friend gave me a jar of date night ideas, she colored coded the dates for "going out", "staying in", "St. Patricks Day", "Valentine's Day", etc. So this really makes it easy for us when we don't already have an idea picked out for date night. Anyway she had one that was marked "For Date #1" so I chose it and it was said "Make appetizers at home and discuss your new years Resolutions"

So I gave Jonathan a heads up last week, to write down some new years resolutions so that we would be sure to have some things to discuss, (I didn't want to sit down to talk about resolutions only to find that JT didn't have any) So late yesterday afternoon I started setting up our dining room table, usually saved for company, for our date night. I'm putting little touches onto the table throughout the hours, and dinner approaches. JT brings in the dinner and set it on the dining room table. My response "Oh were eating here?" He said "Yah you set it up for dinner right?" LOL oops, so we moved dinner into the kitchen and my date night set up remained in place. Next we needed to put together Jocelyn's new crib and dismantle the old one before she went to bed. So as we dismantled it, we started bringing the pieces downstairs, I asked JT to put the pieces in the bedroom so they were out of the way. We finished everything and even put Jocelyn down for the night and felt pretty accomplished! So we came downstairs and I went through the dining room to put the finishing touches on the table only to find the entire crib in pieces ON the dining room table :) LOL SERIOUSLY?? Okay so I told JT to push back the date time 30 minutes and I took and put away each piece of the crib and re-established my date table :) 30 Minutes later our date night was ready, with several different appetizers, a little dessert, special music and candles added to the table and his favorite bottle of wine as well.

We brought out our lists and I wanted to do something a little more in-depth then just reading the resolutions. With each resolution he stated, I followed up with the question, "OK, what can I do to help you achieve that?" I wanted our resolutions to be something that we did together, and not just struggled at them alone, even if it was a personal journey, if I could be his cheerleader then I wanted to make sure to know what it is that he needs me to do! We went pretty in depth into a lot of the resolutions to see what we REALLY could do to make them a reality. So we have our list of resolutions, I'm going to take his list and type them up and pretty them up with some scrapbook fun and then frame it, so that he can see them all the time and hopefully that will motivate him to be able to hold true to the things that he wants to improve upon.
All in all it was a fantastic date night and a great start to Project 52!

JT Says :
I have to be honest and say that I've never been one for New Years Resolutions. So when Mia told me that was what my homework for date night I knew I was going to have to think hard about what I wrote down because I knew she'd hold me to whatever I listed. I made my list a couple days before and looked at it every so often to see if I came up with anything else or wanted to change any of it.

Date night time arrived, Jocelyn was soundly sleeping upstairs. Mia had some music(our wedding music CD no less :) going on in the background and appetizers on the table. We snacked a bit and then started going through our lists. We both had the ones everybody has....work out more, spend more time with God, etc. But in the course of sharing our lists we delved into some rather personal things that we were working on that we probably wouldn't have talked about as in depth under casual conversation circumstances. I personally have a hard time with sharing my feelings most of the time and we discussed some weighty things that I hadn't imagined we would get into. Once or twice we really put our hearts on the table about some things and I'm really glad we did. The evening became what I did not expect it to but I realize now that it was a really good thing. I think I learned a few things and I'm excited to see how we grow. I think I'm really going to like Project 52.