Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day! I love my husband Ryan so much. He is so funny and supportive! I love how he makes me laugh. I love the life we're building together. Every day I thank God for him and pray that I can always be a loving wife to him.

We actually did most of our Valentine's celebration yesterday because Ryan has to help out at the Olive Garden today! We started off our weekend by driving to Dallas on Saturday morning to help my grandparents move.

My grandparents, Papa and Dede

My grandparents are an amazing example of love and marriage. They just celebrate their 55th anniversary 10 days ago. I can only imagine the amount of love and patience to make a marriage last that long! My grandma Dede still giggles when she mentions her honeymoon and what life was like when they first got married. She still tells the story of how she almost broke up with my grandpa because she though he was too shy, but then he took her to a dance and when she saw him do the Charleston, she knew he was a keeper! About 2 years ago they sold the house they had build themselves back in the 1950's.

To me, this was the most perfect house in the world. It always reminded me of the Father of the Bride house. It had huge rooms for all of our family gatherings and lots of "hidden" passage ways. When I was a kid I ran a secret spy organization out of the play room upstairs. I always dreamed of getting married in the backyard, but they sold it right before I got engaged. This weekend was the 2nd move for my grandparents. First they moved into a retirement community in Dallas and now they are moving into an assisted living apartment so that they can enjoy their time together more and get help remembering the day to day necessities. I hope they are still so happy to be together, even though their new place is much smaller than their dream home.

After helping pack things, Ryan and I went to Northpark mall in Dallas to do some shopping! After long minutes of searching the parking garage I tried to park on top of the garage. Usually this works out for me, but apparently not on days were there are still several inches of snow on the top of the lot. I almost got stuck! It was also NBA All-Star weekend in Dallas and the mall was quite busy. I even heard that Beyonce had been there earlier! Good thing I wasn't there at the same time. The fans might do a double- take (read earlier blog about celebrity look alikes).

Ryan eating his Valentine's slice of cookie cake.

I got some delicious Gelato.

As we shopped I did realize one very interesting trend. Apparently some people continue to leave their sunglasses on, even inside a building as it's getting dark. Hmm. I did not follow their trend. But I did get lots of stuff. Ryan and I both had tons of giftcards left over from Christmas. At the time we had already gotten presents so we had just set our giftcards aside to use at a later time. Ryan also still had birthday money from October! All of these factors made for one very fun, basically free day of shopping! Plus Express had 30% off most of their stuff and we had several coupons! We felt so thrifty.

We came home and laid out all of our finds. Seriously, we got most of this with giftcards and coupons! Plus a little bit of it is our Valentine's gifts to each other. We are fabulous bargain shoppers! After our day of shopping we went to eat at Carraba's, again using a gift card! I got lobster mac and cheese, one of my favorite dishes. While we ate we got to watch the chefs cook. It was really interesting, but I forgot to take pics.

This morning we got up early before Ryan went to work and I made us a special Valentine's breakfast.

With my new apron- thanks Ryan!


Heart shaped pancakes

We dined off of our fine China. He drank chocolate milk from a Cowboy's glass and I had orange juice from a martini glass. When we celebrate, we go all out!


Finally my Valentine went off to work. Hopefully he won't have a crazy day and will come home ready to play! I think we're going to try to make it to the Denton Bible night service tonight since we couldn't go to our church this morning. Hope everyone has a day full of love and blessings.