This is from our date night last weekend- we ate at our favorite burger place & snuck candy into the theater to see the new Monsters University movie (which we loved)
As you may imagine, we thoroughly enjoy the city park that sits just down the road from our neighborhood. It has a great combination of lush green areas, a pond for fishing, tennis courts, softball fields, and playgrounds. The mostly-shady path around the park is calculated to be just under a mile, so it's a nice way to gauge how far you've walked.
The picture I took during our picnic at the park a few weeks ago
This past week I've been dealing with some vertigo--out of nowhere everything will start spinning and my stomach will be unsettled. It appears as if I have allergies that have caused me to become congested, which in turn irritates my labyrinth in my inner ear (labyrinthitis: look it up). Not pleasant. So, with the summer heat also threatening to dehydrate any living thing outdoors, I decided to take it easy this week on the workouts by just walking around the park.
One of the wonderful gifts we received for our wedding was a very nice croquet set. It has been patiently waiting for us to do a little research, learn how to play, find a nice sized lawn, and get going. Boy, was it a blast!!! After our walk, we grabbed the set from the car (which is nicely packaged in a carrying case) and set up our field over in a quieter spot of the park. You wouldn't believe some of the interesting looks we got as people walked their dogs past our field. One older couple even commented on how much fun it looked like we were having and that we should definitely save the set so our kids can someday enjoy it, too.
If you're interested in learning how to play, here is a quick summary of the rules:
1. The goal of the game is to hit your ball/balls through a series of wickets (white gates) to hit your opponent's stake, then back through another series of wickets to hit your stake.
2. You get one stroke per turn, unless you
- go through a wicket: one extra stroke
-hit your opponent's ball: one extra stroke (and you can move your ball next to theirs and hit them again to add another stroke)
-hit the stake: two extra strokes
3. You have to go through the wickets in a certain order
4. If you have multiple balls, you rotate through them on your turns (say I have a green ball and a blue ball, if I hit the blue one on this turn I must hit the green one on my next turn).
For legitimate rules with nice diagrams, go here.
We had so much fun and both of us quickly picked up on some strategy and techniques (Darren likes to hit my ball FAR away from the wicket). In total, we played 2 games and each won one... that seemed like a good way to end our first croquet experience.
Once we got home, we weren't quite ready to call it a night, so I referenced my Pinterest To-Do board for frugal date night ideas. As you already know, I'm a huge advocate for this site and have used my pins for how-tos, crafts, cleaning hints, and so on. So when I read through this free date night blog post that I had pinned, I was very excited to try it out. It shares a link to a YouTube channel with 2.5 hours of hilarious videos, which span everything from the notorious Antoine Dodson to a throwback with Kids Say the Darndest Things. This young couple did a fantastic job compiling hours of humor, and I highly recommend you take the time to have a YouTube date night using their channel!
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