Anniversaries and Date Nights

My husband and I recently celebrated six years of marriage. Before we had children, my husband and I would celebrate our anniversary by spending the entire day together focusing on each other, but our time together has drastically changed after we had children. Celebrating our anniversary is about all we do. It is rare for us to get a babysitter so that the two of us can have a date night. For the first five years of our marriage we were in the throngs of a very intense graduate program which demanded more time and money than one could imagine. We got in the habit of not going out and not hiring a sitter to save money. Now that we are living in our home town again, we have access to “free” baby sitters but we are still struggling to get the dissertation finished while trying to save money to buy a house. Date nights are not a top priority and they pretty much never happen. We enjoy spending time as a family but it is rare to get my husband away from the computer long enough to just “be” with us (writing a dissertation and having a full time job are far too time consuming). To add to all of the reasons why we do not make date nights a priority is the simple fact that we prefer to be with our children instead of leaving them to be cared for by someone else. However, now that my sister has moved back she is insisting that we make time for just us while she and her husband watch our children. She and her husband have a nine month old daughter but are really good about setting aside time for just the two of them. So when I told her that my husband and I were just planning on spending our anniversary with the kids, she volunteered to come over so we could get out of the house to spend a little time together without the kids…