How To Be Happy Forever: Maintaining Date Nights

It's Monday.

Mondays are my favorite. When Paul and I got married, we honeymooned in Mexico, and on a long, hot walk to the closest Starbucks (it's incredible, the lengths that Seattleites will go to get a Starbucks coffee; I mean, our timeshare was in rather shady part of of Los Cabos. On our drive in from the airport, we literally witnessed a man get out of his truck in the middle of traffic, walk to the car behind him, pull out the driver and start beating him relentlessly. I'm not kidding. In the middle of traffic, and people just kept driving by. No rubbernecking, no police. It was just... normal. I wanted to die. And yeah. We walked to Starbucks two days later, down that same street. Like two animals.)

Anyway (clearly I wander off topic quite easily): Mondays. My favorite. On that long, hot walk to for an iced Americano and an iced vanilla latte, only days after we said "I do", we talked about the importance of maintaining a date night. We were bound and determined to never be "that couple": the ones that somehow let themselves go. It starts by postponing a date night, and then it's an uphill battle from there. It starts with a cancelled date night, and then before you know it, you can't remember the last time you sat across the table from each other, talking about your first kiss, or laughing about the day you found out you were pregnant and how you broke down in tears and sat in corner of your bedroom crying about how much it was going to hurt.

No? Just me? Anyway. Back on track:

We promised - pinky swore, even - to always, always, always honor our date night. Even if we had no plans, or were saving money, or were homebound with a newborn... date night would always be Monday, and it would always be a priority. I'm not sure why we picked Monday, but I'm almost positive it had something to do with the fact that Mondays have a bad rep... so we decided to give them a little dose of happy. You're welcome, Monday.

Since we've became parents, we've found time to slip away on Mondays. For a Target run. A Costco trip (like tonight). Out to sushi, or to the mall to browser Nordstrom or H&M for clothes that we don't need but will probably buy anyway. Whatever we do, wherever we are... Mondays are ours.

Sure, we've missed a couple. We've had Monday night work meetings that we couldn't get out of, or a girlfriend's birthday dinner that was required, or a football game that just had to be viewed out and about with the guys. But we try our hardest to plan those times in advance, so we can move our date night to another night that week.

I'm happy that it's 2013, almost three years later, and Mondays are still ours. And they probably always will be.