Giiiirl, my husband and I are the undisputed and reigning King and Queen of this topic. We have one child together and two more from his first marriage. We were broke, lived in a small two bedroom apartment, had at least one but usually 3 Kids around, and our youngest was a nightmare on wheels for the first 14-18 months. He started crying when he was born and didn’t stop until he was almost 2 (thank you acid reflux). So that meant no money for sitters, even if we had it nobody would watch 1-3 Kids with one being a screamer... Oh, and my husband didn’t have a set schedule. Maybe he’d be home in the evenings, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d work 5 Days, maybe he’d work 2 Days, 3 evenings, and an overnight. It was bonkers... But some of my favorite date memories were from that era because we got so creative on how we were building our time together.
One thing I did was set aside $5-$10 a week (we were so broke we really couldn’t afford that, lol)... Then I’d spend part of it getting something stupidly indulgent when I went grocery shopping... Usually frozen Chinese food or a junk food that sounded so stupidly ridiculous we had to try it (I got a deep dish pizza filled with mashed potatoes, topped with cheese and bacon once... It was so bad it was awesome), plus maybe a bag of chips and a cheap bottle of wine or a 6 pack of something like Mike’s Hard something once a month. Then I’d save it until a date night.
When there was a night where he was Home and I wasn’t wiped out and all the kids were mostly down, we’d whip out the junk food and just have this big, communal spread of stuff we’d put out on the coffee table and just eat and talk and watch a show (we picked a show we’d only watch together on streaming Netflix so we’d always have something to watch). Sometimes we’d do it once a week, sometimes twice, sometimes we’d skip a week because it didn’t work out, but I always added to the stockpile and we never planned it, persay. We’d generally just look at each other one evening and say “tonight is date night, isn’t it?” Sometimes it would be during a day off, sometimes not, we’d just see how we felt. One time, we had 3 bags of different types of chips and we had a “Chopped” night and cooked these crazy foods together (Cheeto Mac and cheese and chocolate drizzled Doritos, LoL) and it was awful but awesome.
Since I generally had money left over, I’d save it and maybe once every 4-6 weeks we’d get a card game or board game or video game and play that on date nights. It all depended. But I treated that $5-10 a week as the most important bill in the house and we ALWAYS made at least $5 happen. And we got so creative on how we used it sometimes. Once we went to the dollar store and picked out “the perfect gift” for each other and gave it to each other over dinner. I don’t know, it sounds so dorky but really, it was so awesome.
I think the key is to make sure, no matter how little you have, to set aside some money (even if it’s just $5 a week or every other week) that is just for you. There's something so tangibly romantic about it... Or at least there was for us. During those early lean years it was like that $5-10 physically represented our relationship and what we wanted. No matter what, no matter all our bills, all the demands on us and our time, this stupidly small amount of money is ours and will always be ours and we will always make room to make sure we have it. And we did amazing things with it every week. Lol!
