Four formats that work with the kids underfoot, watching, and joining in.
Every list of date night ideas you've opened this month starts the same way. Once the kids are in bed. Once you've got a sitter lined up. Once the house is empty for an hour. Maybe it's a five year old and a three year old and a baby who has never once agreed to a schedule. Whatever the mix, that hour keeps not arriving, you close the tab, and the date doesn't happen.
Somebody left this under one of my ads:
This will work well for amy and I. We will dance while our 11 month old cries, our 3 year old, rides her unicorn, and our 5 year old plays with her Barbie dream house all in one room....we can use the stuffed animals, blocks, tea cups, and dolls (all on the floor) to dance around. It will be epic and awesome.
Nothing in that reads like settling. The kids are in the plan, and so is the mess on the floor.
Run the arithmetic on waiting and it stops looking like patience. If the youngest is eleven months old, an evening with nobody else awake is a couple of years out, and those are the two years you're living in. (If the baby is newer than that, the newborn version of this problem has its own page.) Meanwhile every idea you find is written for a household that has an empty room in it somewhere, which yours doesn't.
The other option gets treated as a downgrade, and I don't think it is one. It's the same house and the same fifteen minutes with the kids still in the room, and that audience turns out to matter more than a room to yourselves would have.
None of this is an argument against getting a sitter. If a night out is available to you, take it. If it isn't, there are ideas built for the no-sitter week, and if the problem is square footage as much as it is people, the small-space version covers that. This one is for the specific case where the kids are right there and aren't going anywhere.
That constraint is one reason dancing keeps coming up around here. Date Nights Dancing is easy swing taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, both of you on the same footing. No studio and no experience needed, and nothing in it requires the room to be empty.
Chip and Dan Heath spend a chapter of The Power of Moments on pride. However good you get at something, what usually turns it into a moment of pride is having somebody else notice.
A woman who had bought the videos wrote this in the comments after she and her boyfriend had been practicing:
I think the biggest boost for him was his kids saying, when did dad learn to dance!
The kids in your living room are the closest witnesses you have. They're two feet away, they're paying more attention than they let on, and they may never have seen you take up something you were bad at on purpose. When you and your wife pick something up together in front of them, that's the version they get to see.
I'm not going to tell you what that does to them long-term. I haven't read a study on it and I'm not going to invent one. What I can tell you is that when men report back to me about this, it's usually the kid line they lead with, not the wife line. The kid noticed. It stuck.
The Heaths give three ways to build a moment worth keeping: change what the thing looks and sounds and smells like, put something at stake, or depart from the script everyone in the room expects. Most memorable moments use at least two. Every format below breaks the script of a normal evening in your house, which is the cheapest of the three to pull off with kids present, and every one of them survives being watched.
Eat the meal backwards. Dessert goes on the table when everyone sits down, then the main course, then the salad if anybody still wants it.
Two adults decided the rules of dinner were negotiable and then negotiated them. Your kids will have opinions. The part that makes it yours is that you and your wife cooked it up together and neither of you tipped them off.
Both of you put on something you would wear to a restaurant, for a Tuesday, at home, with the same chicken you were going to eat anyway.
You can make a game of it: each of you picks the other's outfit out of their closet, then you both change and come out at the same time. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes.
The comment at the top of this page had the right idea, obstacles included. Push the coffee table back four feet, put on a song, and use the floor you have.
If you'd rather have a lesson to work through than make it up as you go, that's what the Date Nights Dancing program is for: the next fifteen minutes are already picked, so nobody has to invent anything after a long day. Either way, expect a kid to end up in the middle of it. That's not the thing going wrong.
In the middle of the kitchen, in full view, three times a week: hug her and hold it for twenty seconds.
Somebody small will probably say something about it. Let them.
Same goes for the sidewalk. If you two ever get out of the house together at all, even to walk the kids around the block, split one pair of earbuds between you and put on a song from before any of them existed.
I'm not saying the kids belong at every date. Somebody else wrote this under one of my ads, and I think it's right:
Dance at home! In front of the kids and also after the kids are in bed! Both are important and bring values to your family and marriage!
Both. When the house does empty out, or when everyone is asleep at the same time by some accident, the kids-asleep playbook is a different set of options and worth having ready. There's also a whole shelf of at-home date night ideas that assume nothing about who else is in the house.
The in-front-of-them version is the one you can run this week without anything lining up first.
It will get interrupted. Somebody will need water, somebody will fall off something, the baby will cry through the whole song. Your instinct might be to read that as proof the idea didn't work.
What you get back from a night is one good stretch of it plus whatever the last few minutes were like. So the thing to check after the song is whether there was one minute in there that a normal Tuesday wouldn't have produced. One minute is a good night.
Do it again a few days later, and again the week after that, and what usually happens is the interruptions stop registering as interruptions. It becomes a thing your house does.
For what it's worth, plenty of guys in your situation decide the season is closed and wait it out. You went looking for a way to do it anyway, with the kids underfoot and no help coming, which is a harder thing to do than it sounds. Push the table back and put on a song. Everybody in the room can stay.
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