Valentine’s Day Planning

Valentine’s Day is one week from tomorrow. This means that I am in the idea creation phase of the planning process. Since this will be the 37th Valentine’s Day we have celebrated as a married couple, that means that I have had lots of ideas over the years. Some were great, others were disastrous. Here, I am thinking of the time I put a table and chairs next to the fireplace in the living room to make it look like a restaurant, and made a fancy dinner from scratch which included homemade cappuccino brownies. I don’t even remember what the dinner was like but those brownies were disgusting!

Then, there was the time when we both made separate trips to Hallmark looking for the perfect card and ended up buying the same one.

Last week, I sent Pam one of the Holderness Family videos which I thought was funny. It was called “Chores Are Sexy”. In the video they made fun of cheesy things like chocolates and flowers as V-Day presents, preferring doing chores as the ideal gift. Pam’s response was swift and decisive, “There is nothing romantic OR sexy about doing chores! I love chocolates and flowers!” Duly noted.

So, I will put my imagination to work trying to come up with something fun and unique. To serve as motivation I will keep the following photograph front and center…

This isn’t a picture of us when we were kids and didn’t know anything. No, this was taken on the day of our daughter’s wedding, 30 years in. We had endured all the pressure and expense associated with the weeks and months leading up to an event as big as a wedding when the photographer snapped this one. Just look at her, heck…look at us. I’m not sure either of us has taken a better picture since. I look at this and I think, those two people belong together. We have taken on the best and worst that life has offered us and made it through together. There may be a few wrinkles here and there. We made our share of mistakes along the way, but we still belong to each other. For better or for worse. Luckily for me its mostly been a whole lot of better.

Now, if I can just come up with an idea that doesn’t involve cappuccino brownies.