Saul and Chelsia: Over the Moon and Back: El. Oh. Vee. Ee

Valentine’s Day Weekend (yes, we celebrate the whole weekend in our house) was a blast. I’m usually a little pessimistic about the “holiday.” I was raised to see it as being a commercial holiday and was taught that you should celebrate love throughout the year instead of focusing on a single day. I still feel that celebrating love throughout the year is important, and giving gifts to my wife on a regular basis is something that I’m happy was instilled in me (happy wife, happy life). However, over the years Chelsia has shown me how much fun it can be to embrace holidays like Valentine’s Day and use them as a reason to do things that we wouldn’t normally do. Valentine’s Day is now a reason for us to surprise each other with gifts, get out and explore, and eat good food (and lots of sweets!). Valentine’s Day is not only a great holiday to celebrate our love for one another (and now our little Teagan as well), but it also allows us to create traditions as a family and gives us something to look forward to every February.

Our Valentine’s Day Weekend Festivities include, but are not limited to “perishable” gifts, good food, an adventure of some kind, a romantic movie, and NBA All Star Weekend.

We decided to exchange gifts on Friday when I got home from work, which was the opening ceremony of this year’s Valentine’s Day Weekend festivities. The theme for our Valentine’s Day gifts is “something perishable.” That basically means anything that we won’t feel the need to hold onto forever (no jewelry, photo albums, etc.). The thinking behind that is that if we got each other gifts like that every Valentine’s Day (in addition to birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) then we would have a garage full of things in a few years. We each took different interpretations of the rule. We each got the other something sweet, and I got Chelsia roses and tickets to a random concert in Hollywood so we could have a date night. She got me a smorgasbord including my favorite gin and animal crackers.

Our adventure of the weekend consisted of a trip down to Newport Beach. We had lunch at a bougie seafood shack called Slapfish where we enjoyed some warm lobster rolls and a lobster and crab grilled cheese. The lobster rolls were definitely worth the price of admission. After lunch, we drove around Newport and ended up at a popular surfing spot called “The Wedge.” We took a walk in the sand and took a break on the edge of the water to watch the boogie boarders and surfers. We let Teagan get her toes dirty in the sand as we watched. She hadn’t been to the beach since she was too young to interact with the world. She had a lot of fun with the sand time and really seemed to enjoy watching the huge waves breaking from the safety of my shoulders.

Valentine’s Day also happens to correspond with another great holiday: NBA All Star Weekend. Since the only day that really matters during NBA All Star Weekend is Saturday night, we had to watch the Saturday night festivities. Just for the record, we both think that Aaron Gordon was robbed in the dunk contest.

We ended the weekend strong with a trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific and with our Valentine’s Day traditions of going out to brunch and watching a love movie. We used to watch Ghost every year, but we came to the conclusion that it’s not even really a love movie, despite having one awesome and classically romantic song. This year we watched Something New, which is an underrated RomCom. We capped the night off by exchanging cards since we exchanged gifts at the weekend’s opening ceremony.

I’m happy to report that our first Valentine’s Day with Teagan was a success. We were able to capture the same romance that we had before we were a family of three, while also incorporating the new type of love that we now have in our family into our festivities. We further established our traditions, while adding to them to better suit our growing family.

-S (say what?!!)