Monday, August 15, 2011

"New" Love


This past June marked the fifth year that Dave and I have been married, and we'll have been dating for nine years, coming this January.  I am so amazed that God has blessed me with a husband who can still make me laugh to tears, like we did last night.


Our first year of marriage, we started a tradition of going out for pizza once a month.  He was still in school and we were living off of my less-than-desirable Starbucks paychecks.  Pizza night was our one evening to spend out on the town. We had a few rules: it had to be pizza, we were free to talk openly about our lives and our relationship, we didn't have to worry about how much money we were spending, and we would stuff ourselves silly (the last being more of an unwritten understanding).  Spanning three different metropolises (St. Louis wins the competition for best) and five years, our dates still have the same rules and I still look forward to them with excitement.


Two weeks ago, we decided to begin a new tradition: waffle night.  It's such a great excuse to schedule in one more date night a month!  Unlike my husband, who could probably eat the same thing every week for years on end, I am a "waffler," as he likes to call it.  I like a lot of different things, and when it comes to decide on one thing, I usually "waffle" back and forth until the critical moment when I must decide.  Sometimes, even then, I change my mind and we have to turn around.  Waffle Night is a chance for us to shake things up a bit and try a new restaurant or a different type of food (and I get to choose!).

We had to have our inaugural waffle night at a place where we could get waffles, of course.  So, we had dinner together (sans baby, of course) at the Brentwood Cafe, a diner that seems like it's been around forever, has no aesthetic appeal whatsoever, but has the best service around.  Lucky for us, they serve breakfast all day.  We had a lot of fun together that evening.  After our supper of waffles, we ordered some mozzarella sticks to go (something neither of us had done since high school), stopped in at a gas station to get slurpee's (something neither of us had done for probably almost as long), and then headed to the neighborhood park to play bocce ball together (something we frequently do together).


It felt like the perfect beginning to something very beautiful.