1 Year of Dating – 4 Bookstore date

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1 Year of Dating - 4For those of you that haven’t been following my previous posts (first one found here) I have created 24 preplanned dates for the year. So my husband and I will have one at home date and one date where we go out. I have wrapped 24 items that will offer a hint of what the date will consist of; some that may be used during our dates and some that simply solely act as clues. We’ve already covered the month of January, we’ve taken care of the at home date for February, our Valentine’s Day (celebrated the day before). I was hoping this date would open my husband up to the idea that reading can be fun; he isn’t a fan of reading; it’s just not something he enjoys doing during his free time. I, on the other hand, love to read during my not so frequent spare time.

I wrote about this date during a previous article which talked about 5 affordable dates. Because I was convinced my husband would realize all that he’s been missing out on after this date, the hint that we unwrapped was a bookmark; something sure to come in handy soon.  So I made up some cards with things to search for inside the bookstore, we each got one task card per card. All of the tasks I wrote up are things we can do together in the future or during our date. An option is to split up, find all of the information on the cards and meet back somewhere to discuss them. We decided to stay together and go through the list one by one, discussing as we go.

  • We started by looking through cookbooks and discussing different recipes we have tried or wanted to try, different things we could change to make the recipe suit us more. I found a recipe for baked French toast and he found one for fully loaded potato skins. We wrote down the recipes on the back for the first task card.
  • Next, we moved on to finding a quiz to do together. We searched through a ton of magazines, read a few articles together (even though we were supposed to be searching for a quiz). We came across a few contenders, however, we finally agreed on one. We could have written all the questions or written down the answers to the questions on the backs of our second task cards; however, we decided to purchase the Cosmopolitan magazine so we had access to the questions, answers and the trendy articles. It wasn’t terribly expensive so I was able to remain on course for the allotted budget for this date. We decided to wait until the end of our date to purchase the magazine and fill out the quiz.
  • Then we moved on to the Children’s section. I know this area well, we have two children and reading is huge part of their lives as well. We read every night, the elves bring them 25 books (one book per night) to open under our tree, their library is larger than mine. Anyway, this task is to find a childhood book, read and discuss what you remember, what stood out, where you read it, etc. We spent quite a bit of time in this section reminiscing about several older books that caught our eye. We only wrote down the first books that we went through which were A Light in the Attic for me and The Giving Tree for him. We found so many that sparked new conversations and old memories; it was so much fun to remember.
  • We skipped though the find a joke part and went straight for the madlibs, we looked though a few until we found our favorites. We decided to purchase a few of the books along with the magazine after we were done.
  • Next we visited the travel section and discussed all the places we wanted to go, and what we wanted to do at each place, it was fun to imagine an endless amount of money to do with as we please. We jotted down the places we wanted to visit most with as many details as we could fit on each card.
  • The last task card had us looking for a poem that we felt best descried how we felt about each other. This took a lot of time and we kind of lost interest, so we changed the rules and found the funniest verse in a book and wrote them down without the other seeing.

After all the tasks were completed we went to the coffee shop inside the bookstore, got a warm cup of coffee and a pastry and went over each task card, filled out the quiz from the magazine, played a few games of madlibs and went over the funny verses we found from the books. The entire date ended up lasting over 2 hours, but it was so much and we can’t wait to do it again. Yes, even my husband, the nonreader admitted to having a blast in the bookstore. All in all, the entire date was a complete success!

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