More later, but I have to say: Sunday late-afternoon playdate/dinner?
Fantastic idea.
I often struggle what to do with the evening hours on weekends, and letting the kids run around while the adults can talk / drink a little / eat is basically perfect. I think this — or the extended family version of this — will be a Sunday night tradition.
In other news:
– We saw Star Wars. I liked it. Didn’t love it. Same with the whole Cinebistro (dinner/movie combo) experience.
– I finished my 10 mile run today. It didn’t go so well, honestly. I think (hope?) my legs were really tired from Flybarre the day before plus it was HOT. Ahh well, whatever happens in the race I will have fun, and training was a good experience
– We had a lovely impromptu family lunch on Saturday.
– My hair is straight again. And it only took 3.5 hours!
– I am tiiiiiiired. Going to bed now (9 pm).
4 Comments
Is C eating a turkey drumstick in that picture? If so, that is epic. Dan and I do play+dinner dates a lot, especially now that kids are older and need less attention while they play together. We usually host a family and order take out or make something simple that everyone will like and let the kids go wild! It’s a great way to kind of have a night out with friends without having to pay for sitters.
We got a new Cinebistro in Chapel Hill and all of our friends are raving about it (big seats! dinner and a movie in one sitting!) but we haven’t made it yet. The ticket price is a lot higher than a normal theater, and I just don’t like paying a sitter for me to go see a movie – I’d rather spend those sitter dollars on a really good experience or a dinner somewhere that we can’t take G.
I like being able to have a beer or glass of wine with a movie (and maybe snacks/dessert), but agree that I would rather talk & SAVOR the food during a dinner out (and be able to pay attention to the movie and not be fussing with food). I actually love watching movies at Alamo Draft house but we usually just do drinks and a snack. The times I’ve been for an actual meal it was much less fun.
we had a dinner/playdate saturday night and it was really fun, adults had drinks, take out and coversation while we made pasta for kids and they played and watched a movie. though one of the kids was too young to just play or watch a movie with the others, so it wasn’t AS relaxing as it could be (also said kid bit B who hit him and there was a lot of crying…of course right at the moment we were about to dig into our take-out).
I’ve never tried this dinner playdate thing. I’ll have to give it some consideration since so many are raving about it.
My oldest is a 6 year old boy and I am finding playdates when he has a friend over (and they can’t be outside) stressful! Two boys of this age put together tend to be wild, extreme energy and won’t focus on any one thing for more than 5 minutes. Frankly, boy playdates in my house have always been like this but now the 6 year olds are so physically big their wildness can be crazy and seems extra dangerous/destructive. It must be a young boy herd mentality thing.
I’ve heard that there are these children that will sit and color or play board games or puzzles with friends. I’ve yet to encounter one in my own house though. I will have to keep up the hunt.
We had an unplanned version last night (we ran into friends in the neighborhood on the way to the library and they invited us).
It was nice, but I also kind of wish we’d had that time to ourselves because the timing wasn’t perfect (DC2 had, we thought, just gotten over being sick–sent home from daycare today, I had a big deadline today etc.).
Most of our playdates early on were whole family or one parent over a meal because the culture until like age 7 where we’ve lived has been to not drop kids off but to have a parent stay, and there was just so much discussion of poo and milestones and things that either aren’t interesting or we couldn’t talk about with our kid, or, in the case of gender stereotyping, are infuriating.
So we were pretty happy when DC1 got old enough that we could just have the other kid over! It’s a little easier where we are now because our friends were friends before we randomly had kids the same ages.