Category: marriage

10 Unromantic Ways I Celebrate Valentine’s Day

1. Usually we hire a sitter and have a date night the Saturday closest to Valentine’s Day. Instead this year I volunteer to spend all afternoon and evening photographing dads and their little girls for a dance at our church. Meanwhile my husband feeds, entertains, bathes and puts our boys to bed.

2. Plan to attend a special Valentine’s Day lunch…with my grandparents…at a potential retirement home.

3. My husband’s birthday was last week and I shower him with awesome gifts. Consequently I use up all my gift ideas and fail to come up with anything for today other than a card.

4. Tell my husband not to buy me a stitch of chocolate because I’m on a diet.

5. Over the past week I find zero time to head to the store without at least one child in tow. Which means I did not buy them any cards or gifts, at all. #EpicMomFail

Obviously not taken this year. 

6. Normally unfazed by such things, of course I get a huge dose of PMS hormones and cry with guilt over my epic failure to demonstrate my love for my family through gifts on a Hallmark holiday (my love language, not theirs.)

7. The day before Valentine’s day I find out my cleaning lady has a sick kid and can’t come. Hosting life group that night means I have to clean but only have time to focus on the areas where company will be, so a romantic bath in a clean jacuzzi tub won’t be happening today.

8. No sleeping on clean sheets either. See #7.

And the most unromantic thing of all?

9. Waking up sick as a dog on Valentine’s Day with swollen glands, a throat burning like fire and a head full of snot. Instead of a romantic kiss my better half helps me get the kids ready for school while I throw on some sexy sweatpants and start popping pills.

10. As he walks out the door he whispers “Don’t worry about dinner, honey, we can just order a pizza.”

Now that is what love is all about.

This post is linked up over at Amanda’s Top Ten Tuesday. I bet there are some much nicer Valentine’s posts over there. 

History Revisited Through Music

Yesterday I began the daunting task of reorganizing and renovating my office. I don’t actually do any work in my office because the space stresses me out. It may look neatly organized to the casual observer but to me it is one big pile of clutter. The desktop computer is more like a doorstop and the bookshelves are overflowing.

One of the first things I decided to do was to pack up our extensive CD collection into a storage tub and stick it in the attic. Mike and I both love music a ton and over the years have amassed hundreds of CDs, but now of course everything is digital. I have multiple iPods and an iPhone and I never use my CD player anymore.

So I sat down on the floor with a storage tub and started going through each and every CD we owned to make sure the disc was in the proper case and set some aside for a future garage sale.

It was a really interesting experience, going through all those CDs, much like looking at an old photo album. Music has played a huge role in my life and obviously in Mike’s life too. I remember well buying my first few CDs in middle school, often very obscure “modern rock” stuff like Voice of the Beehive, They Might Be Giants and The Las. I still have the Red Hot Chili Peppers CD “Blood Sugar Sex Magic” with the parental advisory mark blacked out in hopes my parents wouldn’t find it. They did and confiscated it for awhile. It’s still one of the best albums of the 90’s.

There’s a big bunch of chick music CDs that I brought to the marriage, like a ton of Tori Amos and Alanis Morrisette, and there’s an equal amount of classic rock from Mike’s side. What was always interesting to me were the duplicates…albums we both bought independently before we met that showed overlapping taste. Those were Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam, Live and the Foo Fighters mostly.

What I didn’t remember was the phase of angry, angsty hard rock Mike must have gone through because there are a LOT of albums I can’t stand by bands like Limp Biskit, Tool and Korn. Yuck.

My country music phase is evident and did not last at all. I have zero interest in keeping all the Faith Hill and Tim McGraw albums I bought. Alternative music is timeless to me, country music is most definitely not.

And of course there is our extensive jazz collection which began when the two of us enrolled in a class on The History of Jazz for our art elective in college together. That was a great class and we really enjoyed listening to albums and even attending a few concerts by guys like Thelonius Monk and Wynton Marsalis. Miles Davis’ album Kind Of Blue is pure masterpiece, plain and simple.

The afternoon walk down memory lane was a great one, a good opportunity to remember the people we were before we were married for 14 years. I think it’s great for a married couple to think about what drew you together and what your courtship was like.

It’s too easy to forget.