Round Robin Date Nights
We’ve been placing a lot of pressure on my sister and her husband to help us have a date night by watching Fiery. They’ve been awesome about it so far and we’ve been able to have date night a few times since Fiery has started to primarily eat when she’s hungry rather than nurse. This does, in my mind, place a fairly large burden on them, however, and I’ve been trying to think of a fairer way for parents of young children to have date night without having to resort to professional (or unprofessional) babysitting services.
How’s this for an idea?
Have a sort of round robin affair within a circle of friends who all have kids. The way it would work is thus: One family is up, all the other family’s can drop their kids off at a predetermined time (say, 6 o’clock). The one family can have activities or whatever and a large but simple to prepare dinner (grilled cheese?) that can be shared by all the kids. All the other families can go out and plan to be back no later than a given time so that the family hosting the children can expect when to be relieved (say, 10). That gives all but one family the opportunity to go out for the night. Rinse and repeat.
If you have a large group of friends, you’d only be up every couple of weeks. With five families, you’d have to watch about 10 kids every 5 weeks, and 4 weeks in a row you could have date night. That seems like a win. You could even organize this in your church depending on how much you trust your fellow church goers. If your circle is too big, then just split it up so that the family responsible for watching the kids isn’t overwhelmed.
Or…
We could always go with The Baby Sitters Club.
- On February 06, 2010 @ 6:00 am
- In Life Hacks, Mommy-ing
- Tagged baby sitters club, date night, ideas, round robin
or…you could just call me : )
I’m in.
I had a similar idea for a babysitting co-op. Everyone starts with, say, 10 tokens. Each token is good for 1 hour of babysitting for 1 kid. If you babysit someone’s 2 kids for 2 hours, they give you 4 tokens, which you then can later spend on babysitting from them, or from another parent in the co-op.
@Dee – That wouldn’t make for a very intriguing blog post, would it? ;)
@Jule Ann: I like that idea too. There are very similar concepts out in the time management/office world. Merlin Mann posted the idea of Meeting Tokens over at 43Folders back when he still posted there. The idea there was more to recreate scarcity (which is an idea I still love) but it kind of boiled down to the same concept.
Anywho, thanks for your thoughts.