Birthdays, Anniversary & Valentine's Day

February is a BIG month for us! Both of our birthdays, our anniversary and Valentine's Day are all within the first two weeks of February. It can get crazy, but it's so much fun year after year celebrating our lives and our love. I turned 31 on the 5th, John turned 33 on the 9th and we celebrated 7 years of wedded bliss on the 8th.

Because of these events, we shared some fun meals together, enjoyed birthday cake and birthday peanut butter pie, were showered with cards and gifts from family and friends, exchanged cards and gifts from each other and looked through all of our wedding photos. For Valentine's Day, we stayed at home to celebrate. We decided not to get each other a gift this year (especially with already getting birthday and anniversary gifts), but instead to make each other a card with the various craft supplies we had at home. The cards were fun to make and all the more special. We made chili for dinner and heart shaped brownies for dessert. I even made heart ice cubes to go in our drinks. After dinner, we watched "Fireproof". If you have not seen this movie, you MUST - run, don't walk to get this movie! Especially if you are married - it is an amazing movie. I could do a whole other blog post on "Fireproof" and "The Love Dare"...perhaps I will soon. We are actually going tonight to pick up the Fireproof couples devotional kit - so exciting! We do a marriage devotional once a week so we are going to start this series next week. We are really looking forward to it!

Nevertheless, here is a random mix of pictures from our February celebrations (just a few of MANY we took)...

On another note, we are now in the season of Lent - for the next 40 days. We don't typically "give up" anything for Lent, but we decided to make a change during the Lenten season and hopefully it'll become a new routine. Since it's just the two of us, we've gotten in a habit of eating in front of the TV every night - either at our counter or at a card table in the living room. It's not the worst thing in the world obviously, but we've decided that from now until Easter we are going to sit in our dining room to eat dinner and visit with one another. Like I said, hopefully we'll eat in there more often going forward. We do eat in there some, but not as often as I'd like. I'm ALL about eating dinner at the table as a family, but we've just gotten in the habit of watching TV while we eat. We've recently made some changes to the dining room that you can read about here.

Tonight is "grocery night" for us. If you missed my post on that, you can catch up here. Tomorrow we will be cleaning house and cooking to host our "Dinner for Eight" group from church tomorrow night then we have church and other "to dos" on Sunday - should be a nice weekend!

Have yourselves a wonderful weekend!
Until we meet again...
Riley