Our Valentine's Celebration

This year Jeff and I decided not to get each other any gifts, since he's so busy and hasn't had time to go out, and I have all the time in the world but can't drive when I'm on my drugs.   (We're also hoping to do a surprise something that I've come up with that I've kept secret... so we'll see if that works in a couple weeks!)

We definitely still had to celebrate though.  I don't think I could go a single holiday without celebrating!  I LOVE holidays and birthdays, it's the way I was raised, thanks to my fun mom!

So Saturday evening we went and used a gift card we had (Thanks Steve and Angeline!) and ate at Chili's. 

Afterward we went grocery shopping, not so much of a celebration of our love, but desperately needed, (we hadn't been since before my surgery!) and it'd been a long time since we'd done it together, so we just enjoyed each others company.

While Jeff was gone earlier on Saturday for an on-call stop for work, I printed off some cheesy but cute Valentine's jokes I found, and taped them in places he'd find them on Sunday morning.  It was a super easy way for me to make him smile, which I loved. 

After church we exchanged cards, and even though we weren't spending money Jeff still got me some "chocolate," well, one of my favorite candies, Peanut Butter M&M's!  Hmm....

To celebrate at home (since it was Sunday) we grilled some steaks and made real mashed potatoes... 

I set the table up cute, so it felt more like a special occasion...

And then we tried a new recipe I found here, for crock pot chocolate cake:

Jeff thought it was REALLY good, so if you like chocolate cake, try it!  I'm not a chocolate cake fan, but I was hoping that with the pudding and sour cream in the recipe, it might change it enough for my liking.  Next time I'll try a different variant, like with white cake mix and vanilla pudding or something...

After dinner we decided to pull out all our old love letters and notes to each other that we have stashed in different places, read them, and then organize a box to keep them in from now on.

It was a lot of fun to sit down together and read through all our old love letters to each other.  I highly recommend it!  

We really enjoyed a laid back and low-key Valentine's Day, and hopefully my secret plan to celebrate further will work out in a couple weeks!