austin-moms-blog-travel-with-husband

You know what I did with my husband today?

I slept late. I sat outside with him at a little cafe, and had breakfast and coffee. We talked some. We laughed some. We sat in silence. Blessed silence, some. We window shopped. Then, when we were exhausted from all that hard work, we went back to our hotel room for a while to rest.  Once we’d regained energy, we went for pedicures, and had lunch at Whole Foods. We may have sat at the bar there and tried out pumpkin beer. We got a pedicure (real men get pedicures if you didn’t know).   A little more hotel room rest. More shopping. Bar hopping. Dinner. Dessert in bed.

It’s a Thursday. The children are with their grandparents, and work can wait, because…..we are on a getaway.

And you should go on one, too.

We all love our kids. But we need a break! We need time with our husbands to keep the romance alive. We need a couple of days (or weeks) a year, where no one is pulling on us, slobbering on us, or needing something from us. We are moms, yes (and I was reminded of this instantly upon arriving at our hotel, as I unpacked and found: a diaper in my purse, a scholastic book club order form in my suitcase, and my trusty breast pump), but we are wives too, and by golly, we need to act like it!

My husband and I aim for two getaways a year. In my mind, a “getaway” is a bit different than a full-fledged vacation. Here are my personal definitions of the two varying terms:

Vacation: 4-5 days. Leave town. No agenda whatsoever.

Getaway: 1-2 days. Leave town OR not. A little bit of an agenda (which I will detail below)

Early on in our marriage, we were introduced to a book called “Getaway to Get It Together”. The book encourages married couples to leave behind the busyness/craziness/monotony/hectic-ness of everyday life, where it can sometimes be very difficult to have MEANINGFUL conversation, and go off somewhere for a few days to:

  • reconnect
  • get on the same page
  • take inventory of which areas of your marriage/parenting are going well, and which areas perhaps need some improvement
  • discuss upcoming plans or events that will require coordination, planning, and/or unity
  • Ask each other important questions
  • Dream/goal-set

What’s ironic, is that when we FIRST starting doing this…like Year One of our marriage….we were MUCH more structured in our implementation. We actually owned the book. We brought it with us on our getaway. We came with already thought-out topics we wanted to discuss. We followed the guide to a tee. That’s ironic, because Year One is probably when we needed a “getaway” the least. Every DAY was a getaway. We had no kids! We could talk about these topics any ‘ole time we wanted, in our quiet apartment, where everything was always tidy, and nothing was ever really stressful. Since then, we’ve gotten much more loose about it (I have no idea where our copy of the book is anymore), but what we haven’t loosened up on, is that we still get away twice a year, and we still make sure that we set some time aside for PURPOSEFUL conversation (when we aren’t having the purposeful conversation, we stray more towards “what do you think is the story with that couple sitting across from us at the bar?” or, “If you had to pick, would you rather have a head the size of a tennis ball, or the size of a watermelon?” or “I wonder what our boys are doing right now…..”. )

I really do recommend the book, but if you choose not to go that route, here are some suggested questions/topics to get you started on YOUR getaway:

  • What have you really enjoyed about the last six months?
  • What has sucked about the last six months?
  • What does the next six months look like for us? What holidays/events/commitments/busy periods/etc are coming up, that we need to prepare ourselves for?
  • Are we on the same page with our budget? Are there any major purchases we need to be saving for?
  • What issues are we seeing in our child/children that we need to deal with?
  • Anything in our weekly routine we need to tweak, to create some margin?
  • What is something that is consistently frustrating you?
  • What vacation do we want to take in the next six months?
  • What are some goals we would like to set as a couple/family?
  • What are some traditions we would like to implement as a family?

Now as far as where you go/what you do on your getaway? The possibilities even just right here in Austin are endless. Honestly, in my opinion, once you have kids, you could just book an inexpensive hotel room close to home, and never even get out of bed, and you would be blissfully happy. Oh wait…I don’t necessarily mean that the way it sounded. I mean, just enjoying the peace and quiet, the sleeping late, the not having to do anything…just 24-48 hours of LOUNGING…sounds divine. But, we do live in AUSTIN, and there is much fun to be had here in our hometown.

My husband and I typically tend to migrate towards the downtown area. Lady Bird Lake. Restaurants, bars, and coffee shops galore.

On this particular getaway however, we are staying at the Domain. Here are a few of the places we’ve stopped in at over the last few days:

  • Top Golf
  • Glorias
  • Caesar’s Nail and Spa
  • Whole Foods
  • I-Pic Movie Theater
  • Maggiano’s
  • Punch Bowl Social

Here are a few other links, to provide you with all the ideas you can HANDLE, for fun places to go, and fun things to do, in and around Austin.

Summer Date Night Ideas

25 Austin Day Date Ideas

25 Date Night Restaurants in Austin

So there you go! You are now armed with a great book suggestion, a good list of topics to get you started in your meaningful conversation, and almost 100 different ideas of places to go/things to do. So what’s stopping you?? Time to start planning your OWN getaway…like yesterday.

 

 

 

 

3 COMMENTS

  1. So funny. I found your blog by accident and clicked through, reading different posts until I read this one. My husband and I are going on our first get away to Tucson (where we met and married) in ten years of marriage. I’m looking forward to it but also was wondering what to do with all that together time without the kids distracting us. After reading your blog, now I can’t hardly wait to be alone together. Thank you so much for this timely post. AND I’m going to make sure that we don’t wait another ten years before taking another get away!

  2. This is great advice. However, we have one parent who is a widow (and not big on babysitting overnight) and another parent in poor health with a chronic disease (my mom) and my Dad who is her caregiver and ahem a man so I don’t feel like I can leave my 4 kids with them, even for one night. We are a one income family and can’t afford a get away and a babysitter. So in some situations it is desperately needed but not an option to have a get away let alone a vacation.

  3. So happy I found this post – we are going on our first purposeful “get away” in a couple weeks after 4 years of marriage and I’ve been wondering how to make it productive… so THANK YOU for this – love your blog and all your posts here on AMB!

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