New Year's Food and Date Night Challenge

I know I've been away for awhile. Between the girls' birthday, Christmas and a very unexpected death in our family, this blog has been put on hold for a little while. But here it is....ten days into the new year and I have a resolution to blog more consistently. No rules or pressure, but just more often.

I love making new year's resolutions. I'm not one to beat myself up if I don't fulfill them though. If I do, great! If I don't, oh well, there's always next year. Mike and I talked about some of our goals for 2014 and one of them is to have a consistent monthly date night. Date nights are something we did often when my mom was alive. But then life got complicated and it just hasn't been the same since. We're committed to either finding family or hiring a babysitter to keep this important time that we crave together. We also talked about how there are so many fun, funky new restaurants popping up all over Oklahoma City and we want to try them! We love food. And we love to eat which works out great. Sometimes we tend to stick to our side of town just for the sake of time and ease. This amounts to the mall and Olive Garden. Trying some new restaurants will force us out of our "safe zone" and into some "new" old territory.

Together, we made a list of twelve restaurants we have always wanted to try, but have never been to in good old OKC. I'll list them out for you in a minute along with links to their websites or Facebook pages. If you are from the area, feel free to give us reviews and food suggestions to try. We are excited to hopefully check them off month by month!

In no particular order, our twelve must-eat-at-restaurants are:

1. Ludivine
2. Flint
3. Bolero
3. Guernsey Park
4. Stella
5. The Mule
6. Vast
7. Backdoor BBQ
8. Cafe do Brasil
9. Mickey Mantle's
10. Mutt's Amazing Hot Dogs
11. Waffle Champion
12. Packard's

Some close runner-ups include: Tamazul, Kitchen 324, Victoria's Pasta Shop and Saints Pub.  If we end up with some extra opportunities, we'll definitely check these out too. If you want to suggest another restaurant, feel free! It may be that we've either eaten there or we forgot about it! Our goal is to try new things together and have a few small adventures here in our own city. Oh yeah, and see twelve movies this year. I repeat, twelve non-animated kid movies. That's more than we've seen in the theater in the last five years. Sweet!

And guess what? We are kick starting our date night/food adventure tonight! Mike secretly hired a babysitter and surprised me by taking me out to dinner and a movie tonight. We plan to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and check out Bolero, a Spanish Grill and Tapas Bar we've been really wanting to try! I'll give a full review tomorrow.

Cheers to 2014!