Dollar Tree Quarantine Date Night

My family has been spending a lot of time together the last few months since we are all staying home together. We were already homeschooling, so the kids and I were home most of the time, but my husband is now working from home too. Even though we are all together all day long, we need some fun time together as a family and as a couple. Back in “the old days” I used to take the kids out to fun activities, the library, the park, and more. My husband and I would go out to eat, go to the movies, or other fun activities AWAY from the house where we could spend some time alone with each other.

Since this virus and quarantine started, we have had to come up with other ideas for date night. Most of the time, we will watch a movie together in our room. We have also found a few ways to get out of the house together. We’ve taken walks together. We have taken rides together. We have gone out to eat by getting take-out or drive-through. We have been trying to make sure we still get some of that alone time together in any way we can.

I was thinking one day that we needed another date night, but I didn’t want to just watch a movie in our bedroom. I wanted to do something fun, engaging, and different. I also had been thinking earlier that I missed going to the dollar store since I had been limiting how much I go out of the house. Then I had a brilliant idea. (It seemed brilliant to me anyway.) We could combine the two and I would get both things I wanted. I wasn’t sure my husband would see the brilliance in my idea, though. When I presented it to him, I was happily surprised that he thought it was a good idea. So we did it and we had a lot of fun. We laughed together, engaged with each other, and got some one on one time without talking about work, the kids, the budget, the house or any other of those daily energy draining topics. Now, I share with you my Dollar Tree quarantine date night idea in hopes that it will help you have your own fun date night.

Dollar Tree Date Night

We masked up, brought our hand sanitizer, and made a trip to the dollar tree. The plan was we would each go look for any activities that we could do together or anything else we thought would be good for a date night. I knew the dollar tree has games and cards in the kids’ section, DVD’s, coloring and activity books, and crafts. Our goal was to find something that we normally wouldn’t pick up for ourselves but that we could do together. I was aiming for a game or craft that might be fun. I was a little surprised that a lot of the things that they normally have, I couldn’t find. There were no checkers or chess games this time and no DVD’s. There also were very few craft kits, but there were a lot of wooden craft items to paint.

They did have other games in the toy section as well as some puzzles and a few crafty type things. I contemplated the nerf type guns and water guns but figured that would be better for outside and it was way too hot for that. They also had some cool glow in the dark toys like a Frisbee and some finger rockets. We got the rockets because they looked fun, but again- outside toys and we decided it was too hot, so we didn’t use them. I looked at the books section and thought about some activity books but I decided to pass on them. We both found some interesting stuff to do and we also got some snacks. Another thing the dollar tree has is individual frozen steaks and pork chops. For the sake of a complete Dollar Tree date night, we got some of those to try for dinner. (They also sell vegetables, rice, pasta, and other dinner items, but we had all of that at home already.)

Here is a picture of what we ended up getting:

My husband picked out a little frog/blocks game and a basketball game. I grabbed some puzzles, some rock painting kits, some stickers I thought could go on the rocks if we didn’t want to paint them, and some story dice. (I also found some scented body oil I thought might be fun for after the games. 😉)

My husband cooked and we ate dinner while deciding what activities we wanted to do. We started off with the little froggy game. It came with a table-top, legs, a spinner you have to put together, two little hammers, a little frog piece, and all the little hexagon shaped blocks. You first need to put all the blocks into the table-top, one piece at a time. They hold each other together when they are all in, so you need to do this on a flat surface, so they stay while you are putting it together. This was the most time-consuming part. It took way longer to put it together than it did to play the game. Once the pieces are in, then you put the legs on and add the froggy to the top in the middle. To play the game, you use the little hammer to knock out one piece at a time without letting the frog fall. The spinner tells you which color to hit and has a skip a turn on it also. The skip a turn option is actually a good thing to land on in this game.

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This was a fun little game and other than the set-up, it plays quickly. But maybe we just weren’t that good at it, so it played quickly for us, I don’t know. Within a few turns, we found it quickly got harder to pick a piece to knock out without causing others to fall. Several times I knocked out more than one piece at a time by accident. We played the best two out of three games and my husband won overall. We enjoyed this game and laughed a lot.

Next, we moved on to the basketball game. This is like a desk version of basketball. It was easy to set up. It has the net and a stand, and a finger launcher with three little hard plastic basketballs. We planned to play to 10 points with each basket worth two points. It was taking us a long time to get to ten points though, so we stopped at eight points and I ended up winning this one. My husband got this game because he thought I’d like it. I played basketball in high school and it is my favorite sport to play. This little game was way harder than real basketball though. It was really hard to predict where the ball was going to go. You had to get the angle right on the launcher and apply just the right pressure. We overshot the basket a lot. We also learned the balls bounce really hard off the backboard since they are hard plastic, so bank shots weren’t really achievable. This one was fun, but also a bit frustrating. We had fun laughing at ourselves though.

Last we decided to try a puzzle. I had grabbed two but hadn’t really paid attention to the count. These were the only puzzles they had in the toy section that day and they were all 500 pieces! I know normally they have smaller puzzles, but I didn’t find any that day. I do recommend going for a smaller puzzle (in terms of less pieces) if you want to put it together in one night. This was overly ambitious to think we could put this together. We did get the outside put together and a few inside pieces before calling it a night. I had it put aside so we can work on it again when we feel like it but after our date night, we let the kids work on it too. All of the toys and games were passed on to the kids afterwards, and they loved playing with them as much as we did!

We did end up turning the TV on at the end of the night. My husband found a short stand-up comedy show that we watched after playing the games. It was a great way to end the night, laughing even more. We hadn’t played together or laughed so much in a long time. It was a great way for us to spend some fun time together, to connect, and to do something that was out of the norm for us. Though we do have a lot of board games for the kids, we don’t usually play together, just me and him. If we’re playing, it’s usually with the kids. This night reminded me how good it can be to just play together. Adults can and should play too. I hope this inspires you and gives you ideas for you and your significant other. Date night doesn’t have to be expensive to be fun and bring you closer together. Just hit the Dollar Tree next time and see what you can come up with! (I’m already getting more ideas!)