Valentine's Day

The majority of the time we celebrate Valentine's Day on Valentine's Day but this year we went against the grain.  V-Day fell on a Monday this year and well, who wants to celebrate on a Monday?!?  Plus it's also a fairly busy day for us, it's when we do our weekly grocery shopping and it's usually a pain to have to change that up. 

So it worked out perfectly that B's Aunt J. gave him tickets to a Piston's game for his 30th birthday, back in December.  The game was Friday, February 11th and so we decided we'd just celebrate V-Day on that day since we knew we'd be out anyway.  We decided that we were either going to go to Buca di Beppo or to On The Border.  I was in the mood for Italian and I love Buca's so we made a quick decision to go there but I figured that there would be no way that B and I would be able to agree on what to order.  (For those of you not familiar with Buca's it's a family-style restaurant where you order the food for the table.  So instead of each entree feeding a single person, when you order your food it's meant to serve 2-3 people or 5-6 people depending on the size you order.  It's great when you're going with a big group of people!)  So based on that we changed (at the very last minute) and decided to go to On The Border.  The entire night was awesome, with the exception of the game which was a complete blowout, and we loved getting out and not having to worry about what time we got home so that we could get the babysitter home before it was way late!

As for Y, the original plan was to have B's parents come over and watch her for the night but they ended up having other plans.  It actually worked out perfectly though!  A few weeks ago a friend called us and asked if we would watch their kids overnight while they just got away for a night to celebrate her husband's birthday.  We agreed but refused to let them pay us so they told us that we had to allow them to keep Y overnight sometime.  At the time I don't think we had any intention of actually taking them up on the offer but when B's parents were unable to come and watch Y, we had the perfect solution.  B actually didn't want to leave her overnight but after explaining to him that we likely wouldn't even get out of the game until 10PM or later and then having to navigate the parking lot...we knew it'd be super late before we'd be able to get to their house to pick her up.  So we agreed we'd let her stay overnight.  When we first made the decision I was super excited to have a "childless" night but as the day got closer the more nervous I became.  Not because I was worried about Y but because I didn't want her to wake in the middle of the night crying for us and then they end up losing sleep because of it. 

Long story short, she did great!  I had been pumping her up all week that she was gonna go and play with their 5 year old daughter again (she loved playing with her when we watched them overnight).  So when the day finally arrived she was excited to go.  I kissed her and hugged her and told her we would see her tomorrow and her only reply was, "bye mom."  She was ready for me to go!  Turns out she slept through the entire night, didn't cry once and when we arrived to pick her up on Saturday she did not want to leave!  In fact that was the only time she cried.  It was actually a relief that she did so well, so if need ever arises we know that she won't completely fall apart if we ever need to be apart from her overnight.

This Week in Pictures

So there's not a whole lot to update this week, but we did take some pictures (which I realize is probably the only reason some of you come anyway). *wink*

Our Valentine's weekend was pretty nice, it was our first with a baby so it was slightly different. On Friday night our ward had an adult game night at church but since Y is still nursing we took her with us. On Saturday, Bran had to work but once he got home I drove to Olive Garden to pick up our meal (which I called in earlier in the day). We decided that we didn't think we wanted Y to be out and about crowded around so many people. When I went to pick up the food I was certain we made the right choice! Maybe next year when she's eating people food we'll go out again. Dinner was great, typically on V-Day we go to Carrabba's but we switched it up this year since we hadn't been to Olive Garden for a number of years. It's great living in such a large metropolitan area because there are so many options of places to eat that you can literally go a super long time without having to eat at the same one twice. As for gifts, I typically can't wait to get or give my gifts so very rarely do we end up waiting until V-day to exchange. I ended up getting a little money to put towards the Wii (and a game) and B got the first season of King of Queens.

Y received her gift from my mom and dad this week. It is actually her Christmas gift but they just went online to walmart.com to have it shipped to us, so she just received it this week. I'm honestly glad that it took so long because we've been gradually letting her play with her gifts so that she thinks she's getting something new all the time (maybe that's a bad thing). She loves her exersaucer and has recently learned how to turn herself around in it to play with one of the millions of toys on it (a slight exaggeration). However, with her new toy...our living room is maxed out! She has the new Rainforest Jumperoo, the Rainforest Gym, the Rainforest bouncer, and the Triple Fun Exersaucer all in the living room...and that's only the big toys! She has about 10 other smaller toys laying around and as I think about it I'm thinking that we should buy stock in a battery factory because all of her toys, big and small, all use batteries. I can't wait until we reach the baby doll stage! Anyway, here are some pictures and a video of her in her new toy. We finally figured out how to convert the video files from our camcorder to a format accepted by blogger, then after we converted it we greatly had to shrink the filesize in order to upload it to blogger so the quality may be shotty at best. BE SURE TO TURN THE MUSIC OFF IF YOU WANT TO HEAR THE VIDEO!

I think these are probably the most ADORABLE pictures ever.

These were taken in the morning after she woke up...all I can say is "Fear the 'Fro!"

The Jumperoo!

She looks like she's saying, "are you kidding me, mom?"

Looks like she's practicing some sort of cheer in bottom picture!

Last, but not least...Y meets the jumperoo!

A Very Happy V-Day!

Valentine's Day is always great! Well unless you're single, then it probably sucks, at least I thought it sucked when I was single. But anyway, yesterday was a long day but a really good day. I, of course had a very long day at school and B had a long day at work. We had dinner reservations for 7:20pm and boy was the place packed. I can't say that I was surprised; it's actually one of the best Italian restaurants that I've ever been to. We had reservations for 7:20 but I'm sure it helped that we arrived around 7:00 because we were seated about 10 minutes after our scheduled time but another couple that was scheduled for 7:00 had to wait something like 25 minutes. So dinner was great, then we just came home and relaxed for a while (B has to rest his food by lying on the couch after he eats). After that we exchanged cards and presents (sort of). I guess I should say that we officially received our presents because we both knew in advance what we had gotten. Except B did surprise me with a beautiful bouquet of flowers when he picked me up at school. So I ended up with flowers and a necklace that I had been wanting and B ended up with his favorite thing in the world, Piston's Tickets as well as a gift card to the Palace Locker room (he said he's going to buy the baby some Pistons gear), and a post game meet and greet with some player. The package also comes with Piston's Martini glasses but those are really of no use to us, so who cares! So all in all it was a fantastic day and we enjoyed our last Valentine's Day without a kid!