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Very rarely. When family is visiting and offers. We’ve never hired a baby sitter.

Well, DD will be four in December and we have gone away for two nights and had probably five actual dates? We have never hired a sitter (DH is strangely freaked out by hiring a stranger) and until very recently we did not live near any family.

We hope to do them a bit more frequently now that we are near family. I have two younger sisters who have expressed an interest in babysitting and my mom has said she would love to watch DD so we can go out.

We rarely have a real “date night.” Being a SAHM now we don’t have a ton of extra $$ to go out to big dinners. If we do go out, it’s usually with friends and our kids. Not exactly romantic More often we do a date night at home. We go to the fancy grocery store and find something to splurge on with a bottle of wine.

My sister and parents are our primary sitters and they do help us out a lot. The go-to social activity with our friends is going out to eat. So I guess we do go to restaurants frequently, but rarely by ourselves.

We lived with my parents for almost a year, until August, and during that time we went out every Saturday night. It was easy because we left after our son was asleep, and my parents were home anyway. It was sooooo nice. Now that we’re finally into our house, I think we’ll aim for twice a month, with a combo of my parents, my sister, and hopefully an outside babysitter, because I worry about asking family to babysit too much Ooh, we are going for our first overnight trip in November—two nights in wine country for a wedding. I’m excited! Even though I’m pregnant and can’t drink, haha.

We have been going out once every 1-3 months, but the kids need a Spanish tutor now that my daughter is no longer in a Spanish immersion school, so we are going to have weekly date nights while she is with the kids. I am so excited! It will probably be super low key. Take a walk downtown, grab a dinner ranging from nice restaurant to Subway, and then hang out at a coffee shop. We’ll probably try to limit the nice restaurants so as not to harm the budget!

For the past year, every week. We live in Asia, so household help is very affordable and the norm in our circles here. We have a lady who works partime for us doing housekeeping and also comes every Thursday for babysitting, but sometimes we mix it up depending on what we have going on. Occasionally we will go out twice a week if we have a friend in town or a special event. It has been really amazing because before, we would only go out every 3-4 months. We went out last night and just met up with a friend for drinks. Sometimes we go to the movies or just have a low key dinner. It’s rare that we do something actually fancy, and it’s just nice to have a quiet night without having to rush through the dinner, bath, bed routine.

Whenever my parents come to visit, we get one evening, so that's 2x a year.

Usually one evening per school break we trade date nights with family friends ... they have 3 kids, we have 2, the kids play together, same ages and live down the road. So this is like 5x a year?

The ILs are our daily, 7-3pm childcare so we only ask them for an extra day like once every other month, if it's a month where they have some "time off" (we are teachers)

So on average once a month? But usually it's like, twice a month and then none the next.

I have no money for real babysitters.

We've gone the better part of the year before, and we've also gone several weeks in a row. This year I think we've done one just us, then a couple of family events without the kids. I think if you have one, or even maybe two kids, it's not that bad getting a babysitter, but three young children.. a good sitter doesn't come cheap. We don't really ask my mother in law for help with that often because she helps take my oldest to her activities kind of often lately.

Our goal is once per week but we don't nail it often. We do date night at least once every other month, usually several times more if work isn't insane.

We pay a sitter most of the time, DH's parents do it maybe 4-5x a year. For us, we prioritize the babysitter spend above other things because we see it as an investment in our relationship and our family. It's not easy and takes a lot of effort and planning!

We rarely do date night. In fact we pretty much only do it when my mom is in town visiting, so maybe 3 times a year

We have gone to weddings and my MIL has watched them for us but DH doesn't count stuff like weddings/work Christmas parties as date nights.

If you count those types of obligated nights too then we probably do 1 every other month....

We really need to find a babysitter who can just come by for a few hours here and there.. but it's tough to find someone when you have no contacts.

Rarely- but it probably comes out to about once a month. We can't afford to eat out a ton. My parents do help with babysitting when they can, but they live an hour away so its not easy for them to come for just a few hours for dinner. But every few months they take both of my kids for an overnight and we use that as an opportunity to go see a movie and get dinner.
We had a babysitter twice this summer because my husband had an evening work event, and we had concert tickets. I can't ask my parents to babysit that late and then drive an hour home and we don't have great guest accommodations at the moment.
Both evenings ended up being 5-6 hours for the babysitter, which means paying like 90.00 for babysitting.

I don't mind, to be honest. Our kids go to bed early and we hang out in the evenings. This is just a season in our life together- when our kids are older there will be plenty of time for dates, and a little more money, too.

We shoot for once per month, but stuff sometimes prevents that. We didn’t hire a babysitter until my first was a year, and it was because we had a personal recommendation of a young professional who had been background checked, etc from a friend who had managed her. When we moved it took us over 6 months to commit to finding a sitter- we used care.com and love our current sitter, who is a young teacher. Sometimes scheduling just doesn’t work out, or now we just had a baby so it will be a while before we are ready to go out sans kids again. So once a month is the goal but it over the last 3.5 years it’s probably averaged out to once every two months. It’s definitely expensive, but we are grateful to be able to choose that as a priority, which I know not everyone can. We also do have my BIL and SIL who occasionally babysit for us, but I always feel guilty asking even though they are so sweet about it.

We've been going out once/week for over a year now... most every Thursday we just go out for dinner so a couple hours without he kids. Luckily my step-daughter is 15 so old enough to babysit - we have no other babysitting options so we would rarely get out without her. We do occasionally do date-day's where we'll go to a bigger town for lunch/shopping/etc. while the kids are at daycare.

Very rarely. We don't have extra $ to hire a babysitter. And currently my mom is pretty much at my house daily so we feel bad asking her for more. We probably can go on a date (day or night) maybe once a quarter?

But DH essentially WFH/works for himself and my office is 20 min from home so we try to do lunch together 1-2 times a month. So that's how we "survive" until my mom doesn't need to help out as much and we can ask her for more side babysitting.

I don't think (for us anyway) date nights are essential since we're creative to try (key word is try, haha) to take advantage of the 1-2 hours we have after bedtime/chores, and also take advantage of other opportunities (like lunch dates during the work week for us). Right now spending all that money to hire a sitter and on dinner would actually end up putting more strain in our marriage probably if I end up stressing out abouy finances.

When I was SAH, we only ever had one date.

Now we both WFH and the kids go to preschool and daycare. So we do lunch dates, or some other daytime activity, about three times a month. This way we don’t have to pay more for a babysitter.

I have a grandma and friends to trade watching. We are currently in a season of mandatory date nights about 3 times a month. (Sometimes we miss a week). It has been improving our relationship but the key is we try to do new things besides just go out to eat. This is a new season and I appreciate it so much. It took awhile to build up to this often and I did feel guilty at first for leaving Dd and spending money.

Date night? What is that? 🤣

My DH and I had our last one before DS was born 3.5 years ago! We are SOOOO due for one. That stated, we have "romantic nights in" after DD and DS go to bed so I can't complain too much.

DS is nearly 4 and we have a week old newborn so we won’t be doing date nights for a while! That being said, we did a lot while DW was pregnant with weekends away, weddings, dinner, movie matinee, etc with the in laws babysitting so I feel like we are good for a bit. We are lucky to have my cousin in the same city and retired in laws. Hiring a stranger weirds me out so I don’t know when/if we will do that...likely when kids are much older.

What I plan to get back to is Friday date evenings: kid free dinner of something special either take out or prepared from the grocery store, a cocktail or beer, listen to a podcast or play a board game. Something other than just watching tv. My parents did this every Friday night growing up and we did it quite often before DS2 was born. I look forward to it all week even though it feels like not a big deal.

When we only had one child it was probably about once a month. It helped that we only worked a couple of blocks from each other so we would meet up for lunch sometimes too. Now that we have two and I stay home so we have less fun money it's pretty rare. We actually could probably go out more. We have 2 sets of grandparents and DH's sister very close by who are always willing to babysit. The grandparents used to help watch DS1 when I worked but now that I stay home they see the kids less frequently...I just need to get into the habit of asking them to babysit and we could probably go out more frequently.