Valentine's Day

We had a great Valentine's Day. This is our eighth Valentine celebration together, though technically we weren't together for the first one. Back in 2000, when we were in college, we somehow learned that Valentine week was International Flirt Week, and we flirted over-the-top within our group of friends. But K & I were flirting a lot, like way more than we were flirting with the others. Flirt week ended, but we kept flirting, and it became less of a joke. We started sitting closer together and holding hands when no one was looking. 10 days after Valentine's Day is when we celebrate our anniversary, but it all started with Valentine's Day and International Flirt Week.

We don't usually have too big of a celebration since our anniversary is so close to Valentine's day. But this year we had a more traditional Valentine celebration. K made me chocolate covered strawberries to take to work (a tradition that started in grad school), and mailed to my office coupons for free Kripsy Kreme donuts every day for the whole week My secretary delivered these daily, saying, looks like you've got another valentine. I sent K flowers, which I've never done before. I've always wanted to send her flowers like in that episode of The Office where Bob Vance sends like 5 rose deliveries to Phyllis throughout the day. I wanted K to be Phyllis and everyone to be jealous. But that's a lot of money and in general we agree not to spend too much of our hard earned money on gifts for each other. So I went with one delivery of gerber daisies, and I still think everyone was jealous. A coworker of hers said she was beaming. I wish I could have seen it.

Last night we tried a new Italian restaurant in our neighborhood. We don't have any Italian restaurants that we go to and sometimes we miss them. We grew up in FL where there is less diversity than here and where a night out either means Italian or American food. Here we usually eat Asian food, which we love and could never get in FL. In fact, when we visit family, we start to crave Asian food. But sometimes here we crave the Italian food we grew up eating. There is one restaurant in our neighborhood that is way over priced ($25 per plate), one restaurant which has very little vegetarian food, and one restaurant which we really didn't like. So we were really hoping that this restaurant would be good, and it was. It's a cozy little place with brick walls and candle lighting. Dishes are all affordable ($13 for lasagna and $14 for eggplant parmesan). It was a nice romantic night out, with good food and good company.

I'm sure we would have found our way to each other eventually, but International Flirt Week and Valentine's Day pushed us way back in 2000. So while neither of us are Catholic, and neither of us believe in saints, I guess we both have to be thankful to St. Valentine for bringing us together. Hopefully next year will be our last Valentine's Day celebration that doesn't require a baby sitter.

Restaurant: Olazzo

Elle and The Fertility Diet

I just got around to reading the December issue of Elle magazine last night and read the strangest article. It was a book review of the book The Fertility Diet. The author said that while the diet is harmless enough and pretty typical (reduce sugar, caffeine, & alcohol intake, less meat, more plants and fish, whole grains, exercise, etc), she believes its a waste of time. She said that when she and her husband didn't get pregnant after the first month, she went to get blood work done and to a fertility clinic to see what was wrong, and the doctor said 'Why waste your time? Let's just do IVF'. And it worked on the first try. She is under 35 and healthy. So she asks why waste your time eating tofu when you could be using IVF to get pregnant, because precious time is ticking away. She is basically telling perfectly healthy women to use a very expensive and unnecessary medical procedure when they could probably get pregnant naturally. It's so strange.

Family

My family is totally fucked up. My parents are small town and so white and Baptist and conservative and hunters/fishers and scared, so scared. We are big city, interracial, Unitarian Universalists with eastern religious influences, a same-sex couple, vegetarian - so everything that they are afraid of. We push them so far out of their comfort zone, and as they get older, all they want is to be comfortable.

They've came to visit us only once since college. When we bought our home almost a year ago, I put them on the spot and said "When will you come to see my new home?" They finally agreed to come this coming weekend. They've bought the plane tickets and arranged to leave work and everything. I was talking to my mom on Sunday to finalize the details and mentioned to her that we don't wear shoes in our home because of Indian tradition. She said okay and seemed fine. Then on Monday I got this email:



We have a problem with our visit. I talked to Dad about our conversation last night.
He doesn't like your no shoes rule. He doesn't want to worship Indian cultures.
You either have to accept us as us or not. We're not veggatarians, we're not Indian etc.
We are what we are, and always will be, and we like it. We are you parents and you invited us to visit, knowing what we are. If you're ok with this and you want us to visit, wonderful, nothing else said, if not, call Dad's cell phone and let him know what you want him to do.
Mom



Crazy, right? This is obviously about so much more than shoes. It's like shoes are the only thing they can fight back about.

I keep thinking things will be better between us when we have children, because my parents love babies. But I don't know. How will they handle their little brown grandchild?