Valentines or Lupercalia? OR BOTH!

A few weeks before Valentines Day I started getting really excited about it. I realized that since it isn't a very BIG family kind of holiday it would be a good one to start our own traditions on. I mean, no one is going to be fighting over having us over for Valentines Day dinner or Valentines Eve...well, not that anyone ever fights over us...we just like think that they would if necessary. haha.

So Johann and I came up with making little Valentines boxes for our family home evening the Monday before Valentines day and reading a talk that we thought had something to do with 'love'. We read F. Burton Howard's talk, "Eternal Marriage" from April 2003 conference. We talked about how the message of treating something you want to last as special applies to almost everything in our lives, especially our marriage and family.



Valentines morning we awoke to our boxes being filled with goodies from....Cupid? Maybe we'll make up some Valentines gift delivering entity for next year.



My mom came out for the long weekend to visit so she got to share in our new tradition. Henry's Grammy sure is a funny one.

Grammy's nice pose in her new sunglasses...don't hurt me for putting this up! ;-)

After digging through our boxes we made heart shaped pancakes for breakfast and got ready for the day. We all went out and did some shopping, well, mostly looking around then later went to Gloria's Little Italy for lunch. BEST GNOCCHI. yum. We came home and rested then Johann and I went out to see the film "Coraline" while Grammy stayed with Henry (thank you!). It was pretty good but the best part was actually going to a movie together. I believe it was the first one since Henry was born-9 months!!!

Afterwards we came home and had our Valentines Day cake. A great day of family, food, film and fun.













***Oh, so I couldn't help it and made Johann take this picture of him hitting me with salami. In one of my classic civilizations classes my teacher talked about Valentines day being the Christian holiday that replaced the middle day of the festival of Lupercalia- a festival of fertility rights where at one point women would run around in their birthday suits and men would slap them with meat to ensure fertility. I just thought it was too funny not to do something with that this year. Johann is such a good sport, eh? =)