Project 52: The Monkey Date

Here are the second and third installments of Project 52 from the past two weeks:

Date Night #2: Games

I kept it simple because we already had a few events lined up for the weekend.  We watched the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, played games, and dove into Billy's Valentine's Day stash:

Ah, the perks of being married to a teacher.

Date Night #3: Monkeys

I wanted to do something a little more creative this time and what's more fun than monkeys?  The truth is, I had a couple ideas for this date percolating in my mind but nothing certain until I went to Target.  I scoped out basically the entire store looking for inspiration and didn't find it.  So then I wandered over to the food area and stumbled upon a Monkey Bread mix.  The proverbial light bulb flashed on (I really don't see much of it these days...) and Monkey Date Night was born.  Now that I had a focus it was pretty simple to throw the rest of the date together.

Here's the breakdown of the date:

1. We made Caramel Monkey Bread together. Scrumptious!

2. While the bread was baking, we wrote acrostic poems for each other using the word "MONKEY".  I know, acrostics are supposed to describe the word being used but I didn't think writing poems about monkeys was that romantic. Maybe for some people, but not me. I think this was Billy's favorite part of the date.  He just brims with creativity - both in writing and drawing so this was right up his alley.  We also decorated the poems with monkey stickers.

3. We played Barrel of Monkeys. Billy won. He's a monkey-linking-fool!

This was probably my favorite date yet.  The cost was around $12 which isn't bad considering the first two dates were free and now we have a Barrel of Monkeys game for our family to enjoy for years to come!(Special thanks to Target for their plethora of inspiring monkey products.) Also, having a few activities to do together prevented one of us from falling asleep prematurely, which may or may not have happened on our first date . . .