Date Night Success

Finally!  I can finally post positive feedback about actually going on a date night and it being a success!  Who would have thought.

To put a bit of perspective on the whole situation it’s important to note that I have read many novels in my life time.  Far too many to count.  I have often read the book before watching the movie.  I also have no problem finishing a thick novel in just one weekend.  The same, however, cannot be said about my husband.  Up until 3 months ago, he had not picked up a book to read it out of his own will to read it besides a few non fiction ones (this obviously excludes set work books for school and college etc).  I think he could count on one hand the amount of books that he had read by choice.  He had never, ever, read a book and then went to see the movie thereafter.

But he did it!  He finally read a whole book before watching the movie!  This was definitely worth celebrating, so we roped in my Mom for another Saturday night baby sitting session (two weeks in a row!  We are on a roll!) and made sure that the kids were sound asleep by 6.30 (yes, how awesome – we actually left the house before 7pm!  The sun was still out!)  Of course the only novel worth starting this new “reading business” was the Hunger Games and thankfully it was still on at the movies.  Well, let me clarify, it’s on at one movie theatre only in Cape Town on a Saturday night.  Allllllllll the way out at TygerValley – a good 30 minutes from where we live.  And thanks to KFM, I even got the feeling that we were in a club all the way there.  I never knew someone in a drivers seat could pull so many hoochie mamma moves, but flip, Seth can make it bounce.  But the positive side was that we could go to Buena Vista at the Tyger Valley Waterfront first before heading to the movie.  It was so lovely to be out and about with “young” people again, although I must say that at least 50% of the peeps were over 40, they were clearly very young at heart.  We actually felt old and too toned down to really fit in.

Finally we made our way to the cinema.  We parked at some random entrance to the building and then had to walk for miles to find the flipping movies.  When we did actually find it, we discovered that they were closed for renovations and that we had to make use of the ones on the bottom level.  We even checked with people that work in the mall – everyday to make sure that we wouldn’t get lost.  But lost we got.  Eventually we were shown where to go by the cleaning ladies as the mall was pretty much empty, besides the few people that looked at us like we were an atrocity to human kind – being a mixed race couple with a baby on the way.  You could see these people just didn’t know how to process this information.

Nevertheless, we made it to our seats in time for the movie to start even though my ligament pains were shouting at me the entire time!  It was so lovely being able to pass comments to each other during the movie about how sucky the movie is compared to the book and then to really debate it all in the car on the way home.  A definite good theme for a date night as it gets you talking.  I’ve never really been able to deeply discuss this with someone before and it was really cool.  Ok.  I’m a nerd.  I know.  You don’t have to rub it in.  I’m clearly working on getting my husband to conform to my nerd status as soon as possible too.

So there you go.  It’s kind of possible to have a reasonable date night out even with children.  All it requires is an awesome baby sitter and lots of planning!