dates lately {including our valentine's day date}

I've been really bad at recording date nights lately. Not that it's super important, but it could be fun to look back on things we've done for dates over the years, right? Plus it could maybe give some ideas to other people, though probably not because our dates are mostly pretty vanilla ;)

January
We went to the dollar store and picked out like 35 birthday cards for all of our immediate family members. We didn't pick specific ones for specific people, we just picked fun ones. We plan to just use the top one for the stack for whoever comes next. Even if it's for one of our parents and it says, "You're 5!" Haha hopefully our family will like the idea :) We had fun picking out all the funny cards, and since they were only $0.50/each, we'll be spreading birthday joy this year for less than $20! (except that we still need to buy stamps and stuff . . .)

We also went to the Midway Ice Castle for a date. It was kinda raining, so that was unfortunate. But we wandered through the maze and admired the lights and ice formations and it was pretty good. I thought it would be best at night because of the lights, but now I'm wondering if it's better during the day because you can see the intricacies of the ice formations better. Also, it was packed with people, so that aspect wasn't my favorite.

February
I saw an advertisement for The Bridge: A Musical a few months ago, and as soon as I saw that it was associated with Stuart Maxfield, I knew I wanted to go. I discovered my love for Fictionist at the very end of my freshman year of college, and they've held a special place in my heart ever since. Fictionist was one of my first live concerts, and even though I didn't know their music, I really loved the whole experience, so I became obsessed with them after that. So I knew I had to see this thing since it was written in part by Fictionist's main singer. Russ was wary because he is not a Fictionist fan, but he actually enjoyed the performance. It was definitely interesting. It involved a live band, live singers, Stuart as the live-singing-narrator, dancers, and stuff projected up on a screen. The multi-media-ness of it was pretty cool. I liked some of the songs more than others, I found some of the performance confusing and weird. But all in all, I'm definitely glad we went because it was a fun and unique experience, and I think it's good to experience unique things every now and then :)

Russ was in charge of planning our Valentine's Day date (the Friday before V-day). He took me to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen (he's a good listener! I had said it sounded good a few days earlier!) and we ate yummy food and a freaking delicious dessert. If you guys have not had the butter cake from CPK, GO RIGHT NOW. It is amazing :) Next, he sort of re-created one of our first dates. We went to a bookstore and he told me we were going to pick out books about things we wanted to learn about. Welp, for me, that lasted about 5 seconds before I was picking up every book that sounded interesting to me, so I wound up with a HUGE stack of books, and he had just one. The one book that I grabbed that actually applied to the criteria was a book on gardening. He grabbed a book about Nazis and Psychology or something :) We finished up the evening by watching 17 Again, and it was lovely :)