Happy February, My Friends!
For this past Christmas, I was able to give to Adam one of my favorite gifts yet. You have to understand. I love giving him gifts. I’m not a huge receiver of gifts — just ask my family; I never know what I want — but I love to give other people gifts and show them how much they mean to me.
Over the last few years, I have been able to come up with some pretty fun gifts for Adam. I normally start saving mid-year and planning my gift as I go. This year, I gave him The Twelve Months of Christmas, twelve pre-paid, pre-planned dates (one per month of 2014). As today is February 1st and Adam has excitedly opened his second envelope (he gets to open that month’s date envelope on the first of every month), let me share with you about our January date.
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For each month, I have written up a little letter explaining the date. I considered writing little poems for each—actually, getting my friend Kim to write poems for each— but I decided that we’d keep each month a little different… and to let Adam suffer through a little of my awful poetry here and there (more on that next month).
I have to laugh when I think about Adam’s response to this date idea. First, he wanted to know if he could stay at Red Lobster. I said that it was up to him, so we could stay at Red Lobster. A few days later, he decided that he’d like to change his entree choice to…. *drum roll* Domino’s gluten-free pizza. I definitely laughed at that one, but hey, a deal is a deal. 🙂
Appetizer: We ended up deciding to go see The Lone Survivor with Kim and her husband Brennan after our 3-part date, so that bumped our time table a little. As a result, our appetizer round went from shrimp nachos to salads at Red Lobster, because we thought trying to actually make it to three separate locations before the showing was unrealistic.
Entree: Because we stayed at Red Lobster, we decided to turn our shrimp nachos into the entree round. Don’t judge now, people, but we ordered 2 shrimp nachos and devoured them. They were amazing.
Dessert: We were both excited to try Crepe Heaven in Binghamton for our dessert round. 
They offer both savory and sweet crepes filled with all manner of goodness and even make gluten-free crepes and cakes! (If you’re local, call ahead for gf crepes.) They were HUGE! We were so full from our shrimp nachos and should have ordered 1 crepe because we only could half of each, but they were great!
Stuffed, we headed to see The Lone Survivor, which I promptly slept through most of (hey, it’s called food coma!) and woke up in time to see the last guy rescued… oops…spoiler alert.
Overall, we had an absolute blast! I look forward to sharing with you February’s date, which, can you believe it, takes place this weekend (well… part of it. More to come on that later. 🙂 )
Note: These dates are made possible because of the loving care of my in-laws, who take Titus for the evening (and sometimes overnight). We’re so thankful for you guys!
Making My Boast 