Oh, Valentine’s Day.  We can’t believe we’ve celebrated 13 of you now.  I remember being in our late teens and celebrating with chicken fingers and fries, eating in bed and watching movies all night.  Life was pretty simple when we were dating and carefree.  We spent so much time laying around and daydreaming about our future.  It was pretty amazing actually.

[a few pages out of our photo albums above]

Well, the future has arrived for us.  All the thoughts and plans of one day running off to a new city, settling down somewhere and having our own house have finally come to be.  It definitely wasn’t as easy as the thoughts we had in our teenage brains back in 2005, but we made it here together.  Valentine’s Day might be the most important day for some, a special date night for others, and just a silly made up holiday for the rest.  We definitely don’t go all out every year.  We celebrate love in a lot of ways and we try to keep each other guessing on special date nights and surprises, so Valentine’s Day doesn’t necessarily always fall on the 14th for us.

This year we’ll be traveling back to New York on the day of love.  How fitting that all those daydreams of one day running off and living in our dream house have finally come true and we’ll be going back to where it all started instead of celebrating in our new house.  Part of us is wondering what the heck were we thinking booking a trip on the night of Valentine’s Day, but realistically we are just so excited to know that we can go visit all of our old, favorite spots back home, spend time with our new baby nephew, enjoy a bit of cold weather, and most importantly, remember when we first fell in love.  New York is flooded with memories for us.  Our first date at the park, that middle point between our two houses where we used to meet on early spring days, the parking lot where every one in town would meet on Friday night and we would just laugh and be silly until we were the last ones there.

We’ve definitely come a long way.  It hasn’t always been easy.  We constantly think about the conversations we had when we were seventeen and the one’s we have now.  So much has changed, but at the end of the day we are still here…growing up together…watching things evolve…and pushing each other to be the best versions of ourselves we could be.  Whether or not you celebrate Valentine’s Day, we hope you are all making memories you can be proud of, falling in love with someone or something or some place because when you look back and reflect on the past, you’ll appreciate all the little things you never thought mattered.