be mine valentine

we had such a great valentine's this year, and it was a long time coming. our first valentine's day together was me in my final semester of college taking a finance test (that kicked my butt) and then us heading to arbys for the 5 for 5 deal. not your idea of the most romantic first valentine's date. flash forward to our first valentine's day being married, which was spent eating chicken legs and biscuits from the closest popeye's. fast food valentines--gotta love it. so this year, we decided to go all out--get dressed up, go somewhere nice, and make a date out of it, and that's exactly what we did.

before we got dressed, we exchanged our much anticipated homemade gifts. i gave joel his, which was a semi-scrapbook that i created entitled “reasons i love you from a thru z.” the overall book didn’t come out as nice or detailed as i originally planned because time was not on my side, but it was more about what it said than what each page looked like, so that didn't phase me and my OCD didn't get the best of me. each page had an empty shape like the image below with the words “i love that…” and on each page i wrote a paragraph centered around whatever letter the page was relating to about what i love about him. for example, "i love that...you are naturally Athletic and have big, sexy muscles..." you get the point. :) it really was so much fun to make, and i suggest it as a fun project to make your significant other for his/her birthday, christmas, etc. you can click on the image, save to your comp, copy into a word doc, size it how you want it, and then print and cut. or you can just e-mail me, and i'll send you a pdf with both images. he loved it, and i loved watching his face as he read each one. it was great.




here are some shots of how it came out. the cover is just a black poster board that i cut to fit the paper then i scored it and hot glued the spine to keep the pages attached:





joel's present to me was quite possibily the cutest and funniest thing he’s ever done. let me start off by saying that i love sleeping in over-sized soft tees. i’ve pretty much taken all of his old baseball shirts and day camp shirts as my own permanent sleeping attire. so, with that in mind, he traveled to hobby lobby, bought a large pink shirt and iron-on cursive letters to spell out the name of the song we played for our first dance . then he came home and ironed on our beloved wedding song title by david gray, “Be Mine,” to the front of the shirt and wrote a real sweet message on the back. it wasn’t until later that he realized that “Be Mine” is the most generic, over-used phrase during valentine’s day and was so mad at himself. not to mention that the “I” looks like a "J" because the letters he bought are all uppercase cursive letters, and he actually spelled out "B MINE" sans the "E" because the letters were $1.50 a piece, haha! i didn’t connect the phrase to the song title right away, but it wasn’t until after he told me the story that i just cracked up. his face was just so adorable at his own defeat, but i thought it was great and completely loved the thoughtfulness in his present and wore it to bed that night. isn't that what it's about anyway? overall, the gifts were so fun and inexpensive that we decided to make a tradition out of it and create our valentine's present every year, making it our second tradition we've made as a married couple so far. :)

we laughed for a bit after opening my present and then got ready to go eat. joel looked SO good. i can't remember the last time we dressed up to go eat and he was wearing a tie. anyway, i've never been out to eat on actual valentine's day (day), so i expected it to much more chaotic than it was. we got there at 6 pm and were ordering by 6:20 pm. zeas had a really good promotional menu for valentine's day and joel had never been before, so we figured it was the perfect time. the deal was so popular that toward the end of our meal, the hostess started taking up the v-day menu and table top displays because they were running out of the items on the menu. we had such an amazing meal and everything seemed to be timed perfectly. we were there almost 2 hours and didn't even realize it. i just love when that happens.



after dinner, we rented nights in rodanthe, which was just awful. i expected much more out of mr. nicholas "the notebook" sparks, but it was just bad...very bad. but even though the movie was horrible, our night was so much fun--it was such great intentional time that we had to just hangout and celebrate our relationship and be thankful for another happy year together.

i had also had a chance to make my first layered cake thanks to ashley! i decided valentine's day weekend would be the best time to try out my new cake pans. so i made joel's favorite cake and learned a lot, such as not to forget to frost the bottom of the cake, haha. it was quite tasty and didn't fall apart, so i was pleased.