Valentine’s/St. Cyril’s Day Estimates!

This Valentine’s Day, Ben is leaving me alone with our toddler while he goes to a game conference. Wait, that sounds bad, allow me to rephrase. This Valentine’s Day, I am letting Ben go to a game conference while I stay home with our toddler. That’s more romantic, isn’t it? Either way, it won’t cost us much.

We’ve never been big V-Day people. One year, friends babysat for us and we went all out: I bought new jewelry — well, vintage jewelry, but it was new to me — and got dolled up and met Ben at a hotel. Together we descended to the basement for an insanely expensive black-tie theatrical dinner party experience called “Queen of the Night.”

Unfortunately, we ended up a table that was served suckling pig for dinner, which meant there was a pig on a spit, and there was an apple in the pig’s mouth, and we were supposed to cut pieces of cooked flesh off the pig and put them on our plates and eat them and enjoy that?

The table was also crowded with loud-talking nouveaux riches from Connecticut. (Sorry, Josh.) It was kind of a disaster.

Two tickets to the shindig, plus jewelry, plus the corsage for me and boutonniere for him he bought as a surprise (awwww), plus dinner for the babysitters, plus dry-cleaning = several hundreds of dollars. Maybe that’s par for the course for some couples. It was the most elaborate thing we had ever done. And it was memorable, certainly, but I would have been happier re-watching When Harry Met Sally.

Our normal Valentine’s Days are quite low-key, in part because our anniversary falls a few days afterwards, and we like to BREAK THE BANK on fancy dinner then.

The way to her heart ATTACK

What’s your excuse for spending or not spending everything you’ve got on the most romantic night of the year? And what do you anticipate you’ll shell out this coming Saturday?

BTW, as a Catholic college roommate informed me, Valentine’s Day is not even St. Valentine’s actual day. It’s St. Cyril’s, founder of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Cyril is a patron saint of Europe. *The more you know …*

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