How was your Valentine's Day?

No seriously! How was it? What'd you do? How did you celebrate and with who?

My feelings about this particular day have fluctuated WILDLY over the years. Like a daym pendulum, I've run the whole spectrum.

I think I was fairly ambivalent when I was a child. Growing up, my parents were like super lovey-dovey and we never made this day a "thing." We bought the cards to pass out to all our class friends, but that was really about it.

Middle school was when I really started to notice boys, but they did NOT notice me in the same way! So I didn't ever have anyone to give gifts to or get gifts from. But at like 12 or 13, that's not a huge deal. Not really.

It was high school where I realized how traumatizing this day can be. See, I was the butt of an ELABORATE prank that was played out over the course of the entire day. Starting with the morning news. Yeah.. our school did a news broadcast every morning. And a group of boys thought it'd be hilarious to post a picture of a friend asking me to be their Valentine. Only... it was a joke. One the whole school got to see. I spent the whole day, week, month... and rest of that school year reminding people that guy wasn't my boyfriend.

Want more? Well they had a card and chocolates waiting for me in the office... as part of the joke. The card called me a dog.

I will go down on the hill that high school is a dumpster fire for 90% of the students because of about 5% of them. Only a very few manage to escape unscathed.

Anyways. Just when I thought I was past all that, I was in college. Found out my great-grandfather passed away on--you guessed it-- February 14th.

As you can imagine, I actively avoided acknowledging that day for as long as possible. Even after I started dating my now husband, I didn't want anything to do with it.

Slowly, over time, he's helped me turn the trauma of the day into something I can swat at.

First he tried to take me to one of those super fancy dinners in the city. Our daughter was an infant so it had been a long ass time since we'd put on anything besides work uniforms and/or loungewear! Long enough that we forgot what "city traffic" meant!

Then he started doing little things, realizing we weren't "big, showy people."

• He stopped buying me flowers already in vases. During one of our moves, I tossed like 10 vases, keeping my 5 favorites. So now, instead of adding to the clutter, he would give me flowers that I could put in a vase we already owned.

• One year he got me a 3-pack of tennis balls. Random, right? Well, he had talked to my chiropractor and done some research. It was recommended that I put a tennis ball in a pillow case to work the debilitating knots under my shoulder blade that being pregnant with our second child had left me with.

• One year he got me a gift card to the local tanning salon, knowing that I wanted it but wouldn't spend that on myself.

• We stopped trying for big dinners. Now we know that on 2/14 we're having pizza and brownies! (This is a consistent combo in our family--it's also our April Fool's Day dinner: only we eat the brownies first that day!) We spruce it up with the flowers he's bought for our daughter and me, using the dishes we got as wedding gifts, and eat in our formal dining room for the first of three times a year.

This year we kept it even more low key. I wasn't sure that was possible but we did.

Valentine's Day fell on a Wednesday this year. Not the worst weekday option seeing as we have stuff on Tuesdays and Thursdays but it's always a bit of a bleh when a fun holiday is on a weekday. I tried to make it more fun by making my kiddos biscuits and gravy from scratch!

Well.. the gravy was from scratch. The biscuits were Pillsbury flaky layers because those are amazing!

It was fairly lazy until they got home from school. Then we watched Hobbit 2: (something about Smoag). Babe nor I have ever seen any of the Hobbit or LOTR movies, so we're slowly making our way through them.

Dinner was... frozen pizza. Honestly, I'm so good with a frozen pizza. Kids had Totinos and adults had Digiorno. Everyone was incredibly happy! lol

I had ordered brownies from our grocery store because those are THE BEST--they remind me of the ones from when I was at WKU. Of course they were sold out of the tray and didn't substitute anything else. So it was homemade (ahem, box kit) brownies for us! I tried to gussy them up with a modified recipe. They came out more like cake brownies than fudge brownies.

Top those off with some vanilla bean ice cream and watching Shazaam! and well..

It was a great night. It was about family and doing things we love.

I did get Babe a gift card to TopGolf so we can have a date night some time. (A gift for him for us. lol) He got me a gift card to one of my favorite clothing stores--which I have already spent! And we both got each other cards with animal themes!

Heads out of the gutter! Mine said "I'm otterly in love with you" and had two otters floating and holding hands. His had monkeys hanging everywhere and said "there's no one I'd rather hang out with." So -- PERFECT!