Alphabet Dating - V Date!

For special occasions - birthdays, anniversaries, holidays - we incorporate the alphabet dates so we aren't trying to find the money for 2 dates in one week. V Date falls in November around Kirsty's Birthday so it was Kirsty's choice for what we did. She decided to do another escape room for her Birthday. There were 2 escape rooms beginning with V - the one we preferred is called Vacancy and is themed around a hotel room. But that was fully booked. So we chose Virus which is about a Zombie outbreak. We failed. It was very hard. Possibly because we don't know much about zombies. We did really well in the first escape room we did because we were interested in the topic so maybe a Zombie themed room was a bad choice. We will not give up though! We will escape one day! After we did the room, we went in some shops and Kirsty bought a book which then set off the alarms in every other shop we went in. For dinner we had TGI Fridays with Kirsty's birthday money which was delicious as always. We sat on the upper level and it was decorated for Christmas and looked very pretty. We watched Arrival at the cinema which was really good, we knew there was a twist in but had no idea where or what it was so all the way through we were trying to work it out. When we got home we lit the Birthday cake and read together. Then while she was in bed I drew her a last birthday present - a flowery border around a cute love quote to give her the next day.

Alphabet Dating - U Date!

This date was probably the hardest to come up with. For months I had decided on 'underwater' so an aquarium. But we visited Sealife over the Summer and can't get to another one easily so I wanted to come up with something different. I searched everywhere online and finally found 'Unplanned date night'. So we wrote down 5 different games to play, 5 different things to eat and 5 different activities to do. We planned it so we would be able to do the entire date at home which saved us money.
The game that we picked out was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Trivia game. We bought this in a toy collectors shop a few months ago and had never played it. It was really hard to understand the rules at first but after that we just kept winning over and over again! The next thing we picked out was food: chips, cheese and beans. One of my favourite meals. The activity we picked was Drawing Competition. This is something we used to do a lot. We would pause a TV show and draw the person on screen then compare. It isn't really a competition, just something fun to do. The worse the drawing is, the funnier it is. We drew Santa's telephone, a meal and Dolores Umbridge. Then to finish off the night I put on Autumnal make up and we did sparklers in the front garden.

Alphabet Dating - T Date!

For T Date Kirsty came up with the best idea - Trapped! Escape rooms are really big right now but it's hard to find ones that are suitable and reasonably priced for just 2 people. Breakout Manchester's rooms are for 2-5 people and are one of the cheaper options near where we live. We chose a medium difficulty room, Identify, the story of this room reminded us of Cluedo. We had never done an escape room before so at first we were a bit wary of what to touch and try, but we did get into it and start digging through stuff. We did really well for our first time and got quite close to completing it! We are planning on going back to do another room for Kirsty's birthday in a few weeks. We also had our annual Halloween 'party' (Trick or Treat). We dressed as Mary Poppins and Bert, watched a few films, carved pumpkins, had Halloween sweets and Pizza Hut.