Valentine's Day

I love Valentine's Day! I know that a lot of people find it super mushy and gross and annoying but pink is one of my favorite colors, so it's nice to see it splashed all over the place.

I also am kind of a romantic-at-heart, so...that helps too, I guess.

So when all of the creative bloggers I love to follow come up with ideas for Valentine's day, my heart just swells and I get really excited!

When Emme and I were little, my parents would buy us each a little bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates. I remember one morning that I went downstairs for breakfast and tried to sneakily open it and have a piece before school...and I dropped all of them on the floor. It was sad.

But besides that memory, I only have pleasant thoughts that surround Valentine's Day. I only dated one other guy seriously before I met Pete, and I even had nice Valentine's Day memories with him!

But now I'm going to concentrate on Pete. Our first Valentine's Day together, in 2007, Pete was on-call as a resident adviser. At first I was angry (WHAT? YOU MEAN WE CAN'T GO OUT TO EAT SOMEWHERE NICE?!) but then I realized that it would be great! So before he went on call at 7 PM or whatever, we went to dinner at Fitz's and then on our way home, stopped at Cold Stone Creamery and made our own special pint of ice cream. I'll write a post about the specifics of that later (like, what our special flavor is).

Then we went back to Fusz, where he was an RA, and watched Robin Hood and some other Disney movie (don't remember which).

To keep with tradition, I signed up for on-call when I was an RA the following Valentine's Day. We went to Fitz's again, got the ice cream again, and watched Disney movies again (except it was a girly movie - definitely Sleeping Beauty, maybe).

But last year, since Pete had a real job, we decided to go out to a nice dinner.

It was kind of disappointing.

I'm not going to say where it was, because we both LOVE the place. It just wasn't worth the time or money to do it. It's a small restaurant, and it was relatively expensive for the both of us. We had to sit right by the door and every time someone came in, a cold rush of air hit us. The food was okay, not anything special.

So we decided a few months ago (I don't normally plan that far ahead, for anything. For some reason I was just thinking about Valentine's Day, I guess...) that from now on, no fancy dinners. Who wants to get dressed up, anyways? And spend way too much money on a meal?

From now on, we are going to hang at home, cook some really, really delicious food (preferably somewhat fancy), get our special ice-cream, and watch Disney movies. And instead of him buying me flowers that I'll forget to water/take care of, or chocolates that will only make me gain weight, we are going to exchange books every year from here on out.

I'm pretty excited about this. I love spending time with Pete and just hanging out. We both really enjoy cooking together (this rarely happens, because our schedules are so weirdly opposite of each other), and we grew up with Disney movies. Also we love ice cream. Also, we love books.

Yikes, lots of "we's" up there. Sorry about that.

Anyways, so that's what we're doing for V-day. Still thinking about what exactly we'll be making. Definitely lobster mac-and-cheese, but that's all I have so far. I'm open to any suggestions!