Dates on a Budget – Date 1

When we were engaged, we promised each other that when we got married we would have a weekly date. No matter now tight our budget was we would find some sort of adventure every week. We feel that dates are an important part of a relationship…I mean, when you first start “going out” with someone ( I’m not a fan of teenage dating so I mean “going out” when you are an adult), it doesn’t work very well unless you “go out”. “Going out” helps you get to know the other person, so why stop when you get married? It gives you a chance to talk in a different environment which may help you remember something that happened during your week that you wanted to tell spouse but had forgotten. And just a break from home is nice.

So what I am going to do every week is tell you about our weekly dates. Hopefully, this can give you some ideas of what to do when you have a tight budget but a desire to go on a date. We are by no means a rich couple. But we think we are pretty good at figuring out how to do nice things with out breaking the bank. So the goal is to have 52 “Dates on a budget”; one for every week of the year. Some may be split up when we go camping, then I will talk about that!! But that’s a great date time! Think about it, s’mores, camp fire, alone…in the dark…yeah..good stuff!

This really isn’t our first date since we have been married. But this is the one I am going to start with!

Friday night (9.9.11) we had our date night. We still had money on our gift cards a friend had given us as a wedding gift. He pretty much bought us dates! He gave us 2 cards, one for the cheesecake factory ( a special place for us!) and one to the movies!

So we dressed up nice and went to dinner at  The Cheesecake Factory  

We love their Shepherds Pie! So we get that almost every time!

Their lemonade is the best lemonade in the world so I get it every time!! Trust me, it’s amazing! Sour, with sugar around the rim…mmmmm

And for the finale!! The Red Velvet Cheesecake!! mmmmmm!!

This is our regular dessert here! We just love it soooo much that no matter how adventurous we claim to be, we just don’t care to try anything else!

After our amazing dinner and dessert, we went to the AMC Theatre and saw Contagion. Brandon and I agreed that we liked the first half of the movie, then began losing interest. The biology geek in me really liked the technical science part and I usually like movies like that, but it felt like they didn’t know how to end it. Like they came up with this interesting idea, then forgot to complete it. We also found some lose ends we would like to have seen resolved. Oh, something you need to know about Brandon and me is that we are both movie addicts. He makes movies and I am an actress so movies are important to us.

Ok I wanted to give a little advice about gift cards. I think this date cost us $10. So if you are given gift cards and use them for a date, just because you have free money doesn’t necessarily me you need to go all out. Don’t get me wrong, if you are big eaters and want to both get the most expensive thing on the menu because you may never get to again, GO FOR IT! But for me and Brandon, who are not big eaters, we split an entree’ (the shepherds pie), and split a cheesecake, and we are so full (but this is not just with gift cards, this is every time we go out to eat. Heck, I’m not aloud to get my own entree’ at all, I either have to get a kids plate or split because I can never finish! )! This way, we are able to use a $50 gift card at the Cheesecake Factory twice and eat good both times! My point is that just because you can doesn’t mean you have. Make the cards stretch. That’s just my opinion anyway…do with it what you will….

Until next week…