Valentine's Day

I'm back! You didn't get away from my ramblings that easily :) As you'll be able to see over the next few days when I catch up, February and March were incredibly busy, and I'm just now getting the breathing time that I need to recover, let alone post about what has happened!

Valentine's Day 2011 was a great day. It started the night before, because Alex had to work all day on V-day. The night before, while I was working on homework (did I mention that I took 18 credits this term?!) he surprised me with a lovely dinner of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread. We had an at-home date and watched The Wedding Singer, which I had never seen before. I also want to point out our matching water bottles :) We are huge nerds...

You might also want to glance above at the dying flowers on the table... they were a surprise a few weeks before, and they stayed beautiful for a long time...just not that long!

The next morning we woke up late and I dressed Olivia up for her first Valentine's day!


She wasn't thrilled about the photo shoot, so that's the only pic I got without her pacifier (we call it a plug) in.

Olivia and I went on a shopping excursion in the mid-afternoon to get the needed ingredients for my Valentine's Day dinner. It was a pretty long trip, and it was pouring rain, so Olivia was quite tired when we got back!

I spent a whopping 2.5 HOURS in the kitchen (probably not that amazing, but I'm more of a 10 minute meal person, so it was a lot for me! after taking the time to make an Excel spreadsheet of the times that I needed to do each step. It was quite a chore to choreograph 3 meal parts and 2 desserts to be done at the right time!

The finished meal was apricot chicken, garlic lemon green beans, and roasted rosemary/thyme chicken. It was amazing, if I do say so myself! Also, the new flowers on the table were delivered to me, still in my pajamas, in the morning after Alex had left for work. It was very sweet, and showed his preparedness!

For dessert we had strawberry shortcake and proliferoles (I think that's how you spell it). The hard thing about dessert was that I decided to hand-make everything, which included the whipped cream! Alex and I don't have a mixer, so that meant half an hour of whipping....let's just say my left wrist is very strong now! The proliferoles were great, if you don't know about them, they're a pastry-like thing (super simple to make), split in half, stuffed with ice cream, and covered in melted chocolate...MMM...just talking about it is going to make me need them again!

That was Valentine's...can we do it again? I hope you all had as great of a day as I did!