Date Night In Box – February Unboxing and Review (Plus Save 20%!)

The Date Night In subscription box is the perfect solution for busy couples who would like to fit in more dates. Date each other at home, spend less, have more fun, and don’t worry about hiring a babysitter!

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I was gifted a Date Night In Box to try out and review. However, all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

The Basics

We don’t get out often for date night anymore. We’ve got a one year old, and I’m a bit obsessive about his sleep schedule, so we don’t keep him out late and take him with us. It’s cold and wintry, so we certainly don’t get outside much. Both our families live close-ish, but still about 45 minutes or more away, so we try to limit how much we ask them to watch Camden.

And a night out together is expensive. Whether we just go to dinner and a movie, or we go see a show or do an escape room, we can count on spending quite a bit of money to go out.

Enter Date Night In Box. This subscription box sends you a monthly ‘date night in’ so you don’t have to go out. Everything you need is there, plus you receive a link to a Spotify playlist (and we actually really enjoyed the songs on this month’s playlist!), and recipes for an optional dinner. The food isn’t included, but you have to make dinner anyway, so you might as well try out the recipes! (Or, you know, throw a frozen pizza in the oven because it’s easy and date night is supposed to be relaxing and fun. If you don’t like to cook, you don’t have to!)

The box comes with a pamphlet that has dinner recipes, table talk questions and the activities that go with whatever that month’s themed box is. Everything you need to do the activities is in the box as well. And it all costs less than what a dinner out would cost, without a movie or anything else!

The best part? We shared dinner with our one year old (So let’s be honest, there wasn’t much ‘table talk’ discussion – more like ‘Don’t throw that on the ground, please!’ and ‘Rock, paper, scissors – who has to clean the guac off him?”). And then when we put him to bed, we were able to have some time to ourselves and have our date night together. Right in the house, without ever having to leave or find a babysitter. And I didn’t have to plan a thing!

The Recipes

The dinner recipes included were a pomegranate guacamole, deconstructed ground chicken tacos, a horchata cocktail, and churro mini muffins.  I made guacamole, but I changed it up quite a bit, because I can’t have onions and we wanted Camden to eat it so it couldn’t have fresh jalapeno. But no matter how you make it, guac is easy, and a perfect accompaniment to date night.

The chicken tacos were really, really good. My husband and I couldn’t get enough of them, and Camden loved the seasoned ground chicken. Luckily, I doubled the recipe so I’d have extra for dinner tonight! (We also added this Jalapeno Lime Creamy Taco Sauce and it. was. amazing!) I didn’t make the muffins because I figured guac and tacos is plenty, and I’m still breastfeeding so I didn’t make the horchata drink. Plus my husband abhors almond milk, haha.

Neither the guacamole or tacos required much labor or time, so those were winners in my book!

Foundation of Love

February’s Date Night In box theme was Foundations of Love. The whole idea was to talk about, recognize and build on the foundations of your relationship. If you think that sounds cheesy, bear with me. It was actually really fun.

So, the first part of the date was to build a candle lantern using adhesive popsicle sticks. On each stick, we wrote something that formed the foundation of our relationship – traits, experiences, things we enjoy together. We were pretty quick to delegate me to writing (a.k.a. the teacher) and Andrew to building (a.k.a. the engineer). I thought it might be cheesy at first, but it was actually fun and we enjoyed listing things and rehashing stories to each other about experiences.

Then we had to build a structure out of toothpicks and jelly beans to balance our empty box on. If it had been marshmallows, it would have been simple. But the jelly beans added a level of difficulty and frustration to it. It made it fun to work through together and to laugh when we broke off the end of a toothpick in the jelly bean (don’t plan to eat the jelly beans, haha – there were definitely wood shards in ours).

Still More

There was still one more part to the date. We used straws and tape and built a structure that stood on top of the box that was balanced on top of our jelly bean structure. And our straw tower had to cradle a jelly bean at the top. It was not easy, but really fun. You were supposed to plan out how you were going to do it, but we decided to just wing it and start taping straws together, haha.

We also found out we could wear the straw tower as a hat – because, it’s date night; have fun!

What Did I Think?

I think Date Night In is so much fun! The recipes were delicious and the table talk questions would have been interesting if we’d had time for them.

The activities were laid out for us, and simple to understand. But they were fun, made us work together, and got us talking. We’ve gotten into a rut of putting Camden to bed, cleaning the house, and heading to bed ourselves. Date Night In means that, once a month, we’ll actually take the time to savor some time together, laugh and talk, and continue to grow our relationship.

I know I’ve said it before, but I also love that we didn’t have to leave the house, make any special plans or get a babysitter. If you’ve got kids at home, and getting out just the two of you is hard, this is a perfect option to help you keep up date night.

We actually decided after we did this that we’re going to work to have 1 date night together every week. Obviously we’ll do this once a month, and then come up with other ideas for the other 3 weeks.

Can’t wait to see what they send us next month!

If Date Night In sounds like something you’d like to try, click here! Use code TRUELOVE to receive 2 free dates with 6 or 12 month subscription or use code BEMINE to save 20% off of any subscription plan.

If you try it, I’d love to hear what you think!