Valentine's Day: Pizza at the Drive In

I hope you enjoyed your Valentine's Day. I enjoyed mine with my hot wife in the backseat of her car.

Dig your dirty mind out of the gutter, it wasn't quite as illicit as that. If you've followed her blog at all, you'll know how busy we've been with swim meets, my work travel and life in general. Celebrating Valentine's Day, on February 14th, has been important to us in our relationship. I even moved some travel meetings to ensure that I could be home with my sweetheart.

As starters, I made Red Velvet cupcakes Sunday night, which we enjoyed while practicing speeches and doing all kinds of homework. I even offered them up to be Kid 3's thing to take to school for Valentine's Day.
But then, what actually to do for Valentine's Day?
I couldn't really make a nice dinner, as everyone would be at swim practice. We decided that we'd go out to dinner during the 2 hours that the kids were at swim practice. To keep our costs down, Heather didn't want any gifts or to go out to an expensive place for dinner.  We started to talk about alternatives close to where we would be - Panera and Gyro World were the two low-cost, close to the pool options we came up. I proposed a picnic dinner, but with the forecasted rain, it was deemed creepy to do the picnic in the back of the car.
So, I'm ready for Panera.
We dropped the kids off and then headed back to where the restaurants were.  More ideas started pouring in:

• "we could go to Burger King again" (it was Valentine's dinner two years ago and quite fun),
  
• "Tofu 101 looks interesting",
  
• "Are any of these pizza places any good?"
  
• "Maybe we could catcha a movie?"

There were no movies starting on our schedule and it turns out that Panera was more of a joking placae. We ended up checking out a pizza place which had been previously deemed scary by Kid2 and my wife.  It was actually a nice restaurant and a much larger one than the storefront let on.
But we decided that we wante to watch a movie too, because that alone time is so nice.
We ordered some pizzas (larges, so there would be leftovers for the kids) and then got The American from the second closest Redbox and wandered the QFC looking for some wine.
Since our picnic was kind of ad hoc, we didn't have a bottle opener or wine glasses (yes, I don't have either of those things in my messenger bag). But we can adapt and over come - screwtop wine straight from the bottle!
What better way to show your love than in a dark parking lot, sharing the same bottle in the backseat of a car?
The movie was meh.  It's a character study of a killer.  The wine was meh. The pizza was good. Dinner and a movie with my wife on Valentine's Day - excellent.
We passed the bottle back and forth, munching on pizza, holding hands and simultaneously exclaiming "Ru-Roh" in our Scooby Doo voice when something bad was about to happen in the movie. When you've been married for 14 years you start to complete each others sentences and can the enjoy the simpler things (though I quite enjoy the lingerie my wife referred to in her blog).
We didn't finish the movie before the kids got out of practice.  We'd hardly put a dent in the bottle of wine and knew that the kids would scarf down all the remaining pizza. But it was a great way to spend valentine's day with my sweetheart.
I love you Heather.