Date Night Disasters

My husband and I try to have 'regular' date nights. And by regular I mean at least 5 times a year.

So far this year our dates have been disasters, not so much romantic nights out.
Last year my sister in law gave us some gold class movie vouchers for helping her move house. At least once a month since July last year we have tried to use these vouchers. Every time the movie has been fully booked or there is absolutely nothing of interest on for us. But mostly we just couldn't get in to the sessions without pre booking 3 weeks prior, and as a family we never have three weeks notice for a date night! We were almost ready to give up on using the vouchers altogether.

Last weekend was our first wedding anniversary and we wanted to go to The Vines Resort and Country Club in the beautiful relaxing Swan Valley. We organised a baby sitter over night and I called the hotel. They were completely booked out, they didn't even have the dodgiest, cheapest room available!!! So there goes that romantic idea. So then we tried our good old gold class tickets. And by some miracle we actually got two seats....the last two seats in the whole cinema and they were the front row seats, I literally had to recline the chair the whole way back just to see the screen and by halfway through I had such bad motion sickness I had to close my eyes and just listen to the movie! Very romantic! I sat in the car afterwards curled up in a ball trying not to vomit. It took a good 30 minutes before I could get up again.

Last night we got to have a date night again. Twice in two weekends is totally unheard of. But we wanted to go to the drags and watch the nitro cars (my favourite) so we managed to rope my sister in law to babysit. By a stroke of bad luck her fence had fallen down the night before, so not only did she have my 5 and 3 year old she also had her 2 year old and both our dogs to babysit!! It was a busy night for her.

The drags was good fun, we saw the nitro cars go down once, the second time down they both blew up. We were looking forward to the third time they were to go down the track but by a stroke of bad luck (lucky us!!) the heavens opened up and it started pouring with rain! We missed out on all the final races and because we were sitting almost as far as possible from the gates we had to run (not an easy task with a giant pregnant belly) to get to the car.

But wait there's more! On the way home the roads were very wet, there was lots of lightning and lots of cars. One section of road had a small rise and at the bottom was a roundabout. We went over the rise and as we got to the top the cars in front of us all suddenly slammed on their brakes. 3 of us (two in front and our car) locked up, the car directly in front swerved, we swerved the same direction and went straight up his butt! A car accident? Seriously?? Yes! Thank god we were far enough away to slow down and stopped quick enough that the airbags didn't go off. No one as hurt, not even my bump. We pulled off to inspect the damage and pick up the piece of our front bumper that was now in the middle of the road. The guy we hit also pulled off on the opposite side of the road. By the time we had inspected our vehicles the guy we hit had driven off, without a word to us. So I guess he didn't care about us paying for his car (although we have a sneaky suspicion that the driver was either unlicensed or had been drinking). I was pretty shaky, as you can imagine being pregnant and having a car accident. Thankfully our car was still drivable and we made it home. Today we went out and looked at the car and the damage is slightly worse than first thought. We will need a new front bumper, bonnet and possibly a bit of work underneath the car. Hopefully our insurance company is nice and can fix it for us quickly.
But in the mean time it means driving our second car- a car we wish to sell as it's getting old and we don't want to replace the clutch. We thought we could sell it cheap (as we have priced up a clutch and will tell any buyers how much they will need to pay-therefore we will drop the selling price by that much)
However because this will need to be our main car until our family car is fixed we are now going to have to pay to fix the clutch, pay the insurance excess and then give the family car the new tyres and service it is already due for! Argh!!
What's that rule? Every time you have money in your savings account something is bound to go wrong?? Well that's definitely us! Every single time we save up for something, something bad happens and we have to fork out a fortune to fix it.

I jokingly said to my husband this morning that we should just give up on retrying to have a date night! They are turning into date disasters. But hey, at least we get a good story to tell at the end of it :-)