What a great weekend we had here at home. My apologies for not writing a focused on Father’s Day article today as I intended. But starting late yesterday, my husband and I both shut down our computers and headed off to spend the next 24 hours focused on the family as a part of Father’s Day. Sometimes you need to make a conscious decision to shut off the responsibilities and the rest of the world and just be together as a family.
Our daughter’s gymnastics school hosts a parent’s night out once a month. It’s a four-hour event where they host structured activities based around a theme. Our daughter loves to go these events because she enjoys the activities, the coaches and the other kids. So when she wanted to go to last night’s, we decided to take advantage of the few hours to ourselves and we went out to dinner.
The fun part about dinner was that we went to a restaurant we’re both partial too, but the place was packed. There was some outdoor seating, but it was raining. An older couple was already at one of the tables and they offered to let us pull our table under their umbrella. It made it a bit cozy, but they were wonderfully warm and pleasant table companions.
Dinner Conversation
As we enjoyed our drinks and our meals and the rain fell around us creating this pleasant little bubble, we discovered that our table companions were grandparents who’d raised two boys of their own. They have go out every Saturday night to have dinner and a movie together – it’s time just for them. When their boys were young, they had a babysitting cooperative with their neighbors. Moms would trade out and stay at a neighbor’s house when that couple wanted to go out for an evening.
It saved all of them money and gave comfort to the couples who got to go out and know that a friend was looking after their kids. Nowadays, they do the same thing for their boys and their daughters-in-law – so those young couples can go out. When I commented that I would go out to movies more often if there were more movies that I liked out there, our table companion said something fabulous:
We always find something good to watch because we’re together.
In other words, it’s not the movie they were going to see, but it was going out together that mattered. I could really appreciate that. After our dinner, we went to the movies to see Ocean’s 13 (it was great by the way) and we saw our dinner companions, seated together, holding hands and laughing quietly to themselves.
Seriously, how cool is that?
Father’s Day
For Father’s Day, we kept it simple. My daughter had found a fun card for her dad and then she invited her dad out to lunch and movie. She’d been planning this for several days. She ‘grudgingly’ let me come along. The movie she wanted to take her Daddy to was the Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer (another great flick by the way and hilarious in places). She used her own money from her piggy bank, though we both told her she didn’t have to – she insisted on buying her Daddy’s ticket and her own (I was on my own! Ha!) and then off into the theater they went.
It was great fun and tonight, we shared pizza and Candyland together.
So again, I have to ask? How cool is that!
We had a great Father’s Day and date night this weekend. We shut off the world for 24 hours and we focused on our family – I can say honestly say it was worth every minute. How was your weekend?