Saturday Night

One of our New Year's goals is to go on a date every week. We knew this would be a challenge since babysitting is so expensive and you hate to ask for favors every week. While I was doing my visiting teaching in January one of the girls I visit mentioned that she and her husband were also trying to figure out how to get in a date every week. Right then I remembered an idea that I'd seen a few years ago, so I told her about it and we decided to give it a try. Here's how it works: we found 4 couples that all have about the same number of children around the same ages. Then we each take one Saturday night a month to stay home and babysit all of the kids while the other 3 couples go on a date. We're available from 5-9 and you can drop your kids off for the entire time, or just part. Bill and I were the babysitters tonight and we had a great time! We only had Makayla and Sadie so it was breeze. (The other family didn't come b/c the husband was out of town.) I decided that we might need a project in the middle, to break up the time, so I bought a Valentine's sugar cookie kit at Target for $4. It included the cookie mix, frosting mix, some decorater tubes and a cookie cutter- such a deal! The girls watched intently as I mixed up the dough and rolled it out, they were the quality control crew. Once the cookies were baked and cooled we were ready for their part- frosting and decortaing. It was amazing that while they were frosting it was pretty much silent, they were so intent on spreading that frosting across the cookie. And it was great to watch them use their fine motor skills and squeeze the decorator tubes and the best part of all was when they got to eat them!