Dinner and a movie is fine. But when you’ve been married as long as we have and you homeschool six kids, date night needs to earn its babysitter — so instead of a restaurant, we went and learned how to weld.

The class we took was a beginner’s welding class through Iron Osprey Designs and Forge in St. Augustine. What made us pick welding? Welding is something we’ve wanted to learn for a long time, and we both understand how valuable a skill it can be when living on a homestead where things are always breaking or needing to be built.

We didn’t actually ‘make’ anything during the class. Instead, we mostly spent time learning and practicing the basic skills that we can now carry with us, which is what we asked for. I can’t really say one of us was better at it than the other. For us, this activity wasn’t really about competition. It was about the time together, as well as enriching our skills bank, which is more important to us anyways.

Would we do it again? In a heartbeat. There’s something about learning a new skill next to the person you’ve built a whole life with — sparks flying, in every sense — that beats sitting across a table making small talk over appetizers.