St. Valentine

Did you know St. Valentine was martyred for marrying people the Roman emperor decreed should not be married? Sounds to me like Valentine should be the patron saint of gay marriage. I have never been that into Valentine's Day because I thought it was just some holiday that Hallmark invented, but now that I know it is a celebration of marriages everywhere and the right to marry specifically, I might just have to get a bit little excited.

This Valentine's Day, we celebrated by going away for the weekend, just the two of us, for the first time since Jack entered the mix. We were so lucky to have Grandma Melissa visiting so we could feel very comfortable leaving our baby behind in her expert hands. The original plan was to bring Melissa and Jack up to Tahoe with us but then she suggested we spare him the car trip and just go by ourselves. We made the most of our footloose and fancy-free time by heading straight up to go snowshoeing with our friends Carrie and Jeremy (and their dogs).

We haven't gotten to go on a good long snowshoe hike in about two year, so we decided to dust off one of our favorite hikes from years past. We were going to do Matrimony Ridge in honor of Valentine's Day, but that would be just too poetic wouldn't it, so we climbed Donner Peak instead, named for that other most romantic of memories, the hapless group of people that ate each other when they got stuck over the winter. We had a picnic at the top, frolicked in the snow (which for the boys meant whitewashing each other), and Carrie gave me some photography lessons and still somehow managed to take more dramatic photos on her iphone than my new fancy camera. So apparently, it's not always the camera that matters. As Carrie told me, "the best camera in the world is the one in your hand." (Not the Cannon EOS Rebel T1i, specifically, which was in my hand at the time, but the camera that you didn't leave at home.) The snow was amazing, though, and I wished I could've captured it better. It literally glittered, like it was diamond dust. And it was this perfect light fluffy powder that gave Sugarbowl its name, the kind that made Carrie and Jeremy lament that they weren't snowboarding on it. But I was perfectly content to slide down the hills on my butt. After we worked up a good appetite slogging through the snow, we headed back to the cabin where we met up with our friends Nick and Libby who made us a mouthwatering feast as usual. Nick is going to run the restaurant on Danny's farm if we ever get that up and running. It was a wonderful hedonistic evening, the kind that you can only truly enjoy when you're not accountable to a baby waking up in the middle of the night, so for that, we thank you, Melissa.

Meanwhile back at home, Jack and his grandma were having their own special Valentine's time.

I never got all the details on everything they did, so feel free to fill in the gaps in the comments, Melissa. The important part is that Jack got lots of special Grandma time and reveled in the attention. And we are most grateful for our very special valentine gift of our first weekend away!