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Date Night 2013: February

Our official monthly dates have officially begun!

I planned February as a stay-at-home date, to avoid the need for a babysitter or going out on a potentially cold and dreary evening. As it turns out, the big boys spent several days at my parents' house, so we didn't even have to eat our date dinner at 8pm.

February's envelope contained a short questionnaire for Isaac to fill out, based on this idea from the Dating Divas. It read something like this:

Choose one option from each of the following:
hot/cold
fast/slow
circle/square
up/down/in-between

He was instructed (and then reminded several times) to return the questionnaire to me one week prior to our scheduled date night (so that I would have time to do the appropriate grocery shopping). He didn't know it at the time, but he was, in effect, planning our dinner-and-activity date! According to his chosen answers, we:

--shared an appetizer of roasted red pepper hummus and sliced veggies when he arrived home from work (cold)
--feasted on crockpot chili and cornbread waffles (slow)
--played a few matches of Wii tennis (up)
--indulged in grasshopper brownies (square)

A few points of interest about the day:

--Did you know you can use natural peanut butter in place of tahini when making homemade hummus? I really didn't want to fork out the $7 or so it would cost for a jar of tahini. Most sites suggested using all peanut butter, but one recommended doing half peanut butter, half sesame oil, so that you'd get some of that sesame flavor, so that's what I did. It seems to have worked: if Isaac noticed anything weird, he didn't say anything! (Of course, the garlic was so overpowering he may not have been able to tell.)

--As long as I had the crockpot going, I took the opportunity to double the chili recipe and put a bunch in the freezer. We have at least 2-3 future dinners in the freezer now, along with a few leftover waffles. Hooray!

--We appear to be fairly equally matched in Wii tennis these days, though probably only because I've been practicing during nap time occasionally. Out of four matches, we each won two and lost two.

--I only made 1/3 of the brownie recipe, and baked it in a bread pan. I just didn't want that much dessert hanging around, and given the measurements of the ingredients, it was easier to do a third than a half. Good thing, too, since I managed to inhale three of them today.

There wasn't really anything to take pictures of in this date, so I'll leave you with one from the archives: the second picture ever taken of us. November 2006. The days of straightened hair, rimless glasses that wouldn't stay up, and the plaid wool lumberjack shirt that no longer has residence in our home.




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