Off the Beaten Path: Valentine's Day

I feel pretty lucky to have a Valentine - we have gone from boyfriend/girlfriend, to fiance, to husband/wife, to parents in just over 3 years. I love him more each day and love seeing the way we change and grow with each other as our lives change. This Valentine's we shared with our baby girl Ava and even though we don't do a lot with regards to flowers, balloons, and expensive dinners, I loved spending the night with both of them. I love you both with all my heart!

Here is a recall of our romantic gift exchange:

We don't do a whole lot for Valentine's day, but I do always request a card. I learned early in our relationship to not say "I don't want anything for Valentine's Day" if you actually do want something...anything. So I make my request even if it's small so that I don't end up with my "I don't want anything" ever again.

I got off work early, picked up Ava, and arrived home around 4:45pm. I try to entertain Ava while rummaging through my purse to find the two cards I bought the night before.   I get my cards set up on the coffee table, let the dogs out, grab a quick bite of food and sit down to write on the cards. I check the time. 5:05.  I know Kyle will be home in about 5 minutes...maybe 15 minutes if he still has to run to the store to get my Valentine's card. Which is a good possibility. I got Kyle a card from me as well as one from Ava. I get Ava's card out first because we have to get a little crafty with hers. I find an inkpad and put a couple handprints of Ava's on the card and write with my left hand to sign her name and say "Happy Valentine's Daddy". It's a mess, but it's cute because it's supposed to look handmade by her.

Then I get out my card and just start the first sentence and I hear the garage door open. Crap. Kyle walks through the door and I yell from the living room to not come into the room. He states that I shouldn't look either and he runs into our room to grab his Valentine's cards. He sits down in the other room as we both write on our cards last minute. I do put some thought into my card for Kyle and write a few things about how much I love him and finish up in a couple minutes. And then I wait. What is taking Kyle so long. So I shout to the other room that I didn't take that long to imply that he doesn't need to try too hard either. Or more so so that he doens't one-up me on what he writes. Romantic right?!

He finishes the cards and comes into the living room with us. He hands a card to me and then proudly hands a card to Ava. And I'm like shit! I didn't get Ava a card. So I hand him a card...and then I laugh and hand him another card. Two cards for him from us, none for Ava. We both wrote pretty thoughtful things and his card to Ava was adorable. Telling her how blessed we are to have her and how much he loves her and that she is his Valentine and it says Love, Dad at the bottom. And I let him know I will be signing Mom at the bottom, too. I can't let her look back at this card years to come and think only Dad cared about her. Fail!

We also decided we were going to celebrate by making dinner together. I found recipes online the day before. I googled Valentine's Day recipes and came across recipes like Veal with fresh Thyme and Pork Loins with Apricot blah blah blah. Come on now! There is no way I'm capable of making that and especially not if I'm looking up a recipe the day before. So I look up pasta dishes and print off a few and we settled on Cheese Ravioli with Basil.  We obviously didn't buy the ingredients yet, so we are off to the store around 6pm the night of Valentine's Day to get our meal started.

We head out the door and our grocery store is all of 3 minutes away. But 2 minutes into it we realize that I didn't grab the diaper bag on the way out the door. We decide to go without since we just fed her before we left. Wouldn't you know the parking lot is full of people just like us. Slam packed with people just like us. Shout out to all the procrastinators! We grab our ingredients quickly knowing that we are treading carefully with our baby that doesn't have her bottle. Kyle adds some steak to the recipe because he is good at improvising like that and we also realize we need white wine for the ravioli recipe.  As we leave the grocery store to head to the liquor store literally another 60 seconds down the road, Ava lets out a cry. Game over and we didn't beat the buzzer. Kyle drives us back home and heads back out for the wine without us.

Kyle gets back home as I'm still consoling our crying girl. She really just needs to fall asleep but she's not letting herself. I rock her in the living. I feed her in the rocking chair. I sing to her with ~~her~~ my favorite Pandora station. In the meantime Kyle has made the entire meal and she is finally konking out. In addition to the white wine (that apparently had a screw top), Kyle got me moscato to drink. I'm not a real wine drinker, but moscato is like delicious alcoholic grape juice and right up my alley. He gets out the moscato and then I hear him grumbling. We don't have a wine opener. While I would have just given up, Kyle tries to think of some Macgyver way to open the bottle. A couple minutes later I hear a strange sound coming from the kitchen. I shout to Kyle to figure out what is going on and he comes around the corner with his new electric screwdriver he had gotten for Christmas. Whatever, I'm getting kinda used to these things. And for the most part what he does actually works. So soon enough I had a glass of moscato in my hand.

In the end we had a delicious Valentine's dinner and it was nice to spend at home with all of us.

Here's are a few V-day pics