Valentine's Day

I got to start my Valentine's Day with a date with Zane this morning. We went to the bakery for donuts, where we sat and chatted. Zane is a fantastic conversationalist. He loves to explain things ("Did you know that tigers are the biggest cats? And the most dangerous? If they attack you, you only have a 30% chance of surviving. And they're as long as our van from the front to the back!" - He also likes to kind of make up statistics, so i'm always pretty wary of accepting them from him.) and answer questions with long answers that give extra information, so i never feel like i'm trying to drag interesting conversation out of him. It's lovely. And then we went to the pet store and walked around for about an hour, just looking at the cute animals (chipmunks! finches! chameleons!) and the weird and icky and ugly animals (snakes! tarantulas! ugly fish!).

Zane was telling me that i'm really lucky, because i get to go on three dates every two months, because i get to take each kid out. And i AM really lucky. I love getting to totally focus all of my attention and time on just one kid sometimes. They're amazing kids. I love them like crazy. I want to make sure i enjoy them while they still want to spend time with me!

This afternoon, Houston and i discovered that his fish Swimmy had died, which was the total low point of the day. Houston's had his this fish since he was about 6, so he's really sad. To be fair, he lived approximately 6 years longer than every fish i ever had. Most of mine committed suicide by leaping out of their bowls within the first few days, so Swimmy had a pretty long life by comparison. Which, actually, makes it much sadder for Houston.

Beth offered to babysit for us tonight, and so Juanito and i got to go on a date. We went to Noodles & Company for dinner, where we sat for an hour and a half and just talked about whatever we wanted to and were not interrupted even once with requests for help or attention or anything. I like Juanito. It's lovely to get to sit and talk with him without distractions.

And then, because we are romantic, we went to Meijer and walked around slowly, buying random things like shovels (because ours was stolen and we live in Michigan where...snow. And also because they were on clearance for $5), and a new toilet seat because ours is getting old and gross, and toilet paper, and a book for Houston's birthday. And also cheesecake, to eat with Beth while we watched a movie. It was a very odd assortment of stuff. And even just walking around a store together was really fun; we had no list or agenda, so we could just wander and look and talk.

And then we came back, put the kids in bed, and watched a movie with Beth, afterwards we all just kind of went, ".... Huh...." and then shook our heads and sat and talked about other random stuff for the next couple of hours.

And ate cheesecake. Mmmm.