A couple weeks ago me and one of my good friends were hanging out early in the morning during our weekly accountability session and we wanted an easy way to be able to date our wives.

Its so important that you continue to date your wife after you’re married but with kids and responsibilities it becomes almost impossible.  So we committed to work it out.  We got together with one more friend and formed a co-op of sorts to help each other out.

Mick and I on a date at a Hawks game.

The way it works is that we schedule date nights for every other Friday and each couple rotates to watch the others kids.  Since we have 3 couples in our rotation we get 2 dates in a row and then watch kids for one week.  We each have 2 kids so the number of kids isn’t a huge burden for one couple.  In the future I could see adding more couples to the rotation but we would have to double up on the babysitters which could be fun as well.

Last night was the first one and was a lot of fun.  We dropped the kids off around 6 and headed to Okoboji Grill in Ankeny.  We had a $25 gift certificate from Restaurant.com that we had bought for $2.  The only stipulations were that you had to spend at least $35 and %18 gratuity was included.

The gift certificate was a bit of a fiasco because they were very slow with the service so they offered to pay for part of our meal – unfortunately we couldn’t have them do that because then we wouldn’t meet the $35 requirement.  They ended up giving us a coupon for a free appetizer for next time.  Our total bill we paid was around $18 which included 2 entrees 2 drinks and 2 desserts.  The food was worth a little over $40 so we got a pretty good deal.

After that we just walked around Wal-Mart.  Doesn’t sound too exciting but it was fun just being together by ourselves.  We tried to play the guitar hero demo they had set up but it didn’t work right.

I’m really looking forward to these nights and hopefully it will work out.  Get together with a couple friends and do it yourself!