Date Night Jar

I've been feeling way too technology overrun lately. It doesn't help that I work from home and when my husband comes home he wants to play games or watch TV to decompress from his job. I love our life here in Cali, I really do. It seems to fit us and our desires for our marriage, but I feel like technology is making us less "close" if that makes any sense.

I want some unplugging time and with him finally going on crew for work after 10 months of training, I needed to find a clever way to introduce new things to us and to shake up our home body nature we've established since moving here 4 months ago.

Elizabeth over at The Young Retiree is doing 52 dates with her husband- 1 date a week and I thought it was a brilliant starting point. I've seen the Popsicle date jar ideas on pinterest, but I was out of Popsicle sticks. We may have some big changes coming in a week and so weekly dates aren't entirely plausible but I figure we can start with monthly ones and add a date here and there if needed.

Also I can exactly say why on the blog but this year is so important to me that we explore and discover and really get close to one another. Deployments are looming and other big life changes and I just need this year to be the best we have ever had thus far.

Well yesterday was just too beautiful. 60 degrees outside and it was too nice to go to waste. So I ran the Date Night Jar idea by my handsome husband- he seemed iffy but on board, we opened the windows, sat in the sun and got to work:

I used strips of paper and handsome got to work googling things in Northern California. We chose 3 categories:

Free
Money Required
Planning Required

Money & Planning kind of go hand in hand and we kept our excursions no more than 3 hours away driving wise to cover more of the planning required. That gave us a range from Santa Cruz- Avenue of the Giants- Tahoe- Yosemite. HUGE circle in california for us to explore.

We googled everything:

Lighthouses- i believe there are 4 to be exact nearby
Swimming Holes
Theaters/Comedy Clubs
Restaurants
Wineries (I think we threw in a bunch of those- because we love wine as you know)
Parks & Hikes
Theme Parks
Scenery & Festivals

Anything you can think of as an option for the two of us we put in there. There are tons of things we have never done before as a couple or individual that I am really excited about. We are thinking of investing in some hiking/outdoor shoes since we have none and I would really love to get out more and explore. I've seen some hiking back packs for sale on the yard sale sites and I may snag one up here just in case.

So here's to our Date Night Jar- starting next month- because we're going out of town this weekend for my handsome husband's 29th birthday!