In-home dates

Scott and I, more often than not, do in-home date nights, meaning we wait until the kids are in bed and then we have popcorn and a movie, play a game, or get take out from a restaurant etc. We love spending one-on-one time together and having date nights each week, and having in-home date nights makes that possible for us. Jane is 18 months and perhaps others think she's old enough for a babysitter, but she's a handful and I won't leave her with a teenager especially when that teen would also have 3 others to watch. So actually going out on dates doesn't happen too often, though we do go every other month when my friend(who is also a mom of four) can watch them. Sometimes we'll go when family comes to visit or sometimes we'll do a date with a teen babysitter but bring Jane with us, but definitely not weekly and many times not even monthly.

This past Saturday we planned a dinner date night. I always get so excited when we plan something that involves bringing food in! Scott and I love to get Indian food now and then and we hadn't had it in awhile, so we made home-made pizza for the kids, got them to bed by 8pm and then we had candle light dinner with Indian take-out. It was so nice to sit at the table together, just the two of us, not having to worry about getting up and down getting things for children. We were able to just sit, eat and visit. And we had zero interruptions.

This is my favorite Indian food ever! It's called Paneer Tiki Masala. It has a home made cheese, onions, peppers in an amazing creamy orange sauce and is served with indian rice and Naan bread. Yum! Scott usually gets the butter chicken which we think is the same sauce and it's also super yummy.

*As a side note, sometimes Charlie won't eat much at dinner time, but then he'll come back to the kitchen just before bed 'starving' and will eat his dinner at that time. Because we know this about him, if we noticed he didn't eat much, we'll leave him a dinner plate on the table he can warm up. On this particular night we left the rest of the pizza on the table since he didn't eat, and while we were reading scriptures(kids were in their pajamas) Jane walked into the kitchen, pulled out a chair, climbed on the table, grabbed a piece of pizza and sat there and ate it. Scott walked into the kitchen to see what she was doing and said, "Elisa, come look at your daughter." I thought it was cute(even though we've been trying to teach her not to get on the table), so I took a picture :).

By the way, my family is obsessed with this pizza dough recipe. It's the one in my recipe section called sourdough spelt pizza, though I actually don't do the sourdough part, and sometimes I use half wheat or all wheat. We cook it on the pizza stone and it rises perfectly, has the perfect amount of crisp on the bottom of the crust(maybe because of the pizza stone) and the top is soft and so delicious. And this dough recipe makes three pizzas so I can freeze the crust and it turns out wonderfully later.