Image courtesy of KEKO64 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Wow, I haven’t written a substantive post in a while. Work has been overwhelming lately and I started a wood refinishing project that has been taking up my limited free time. Blogging has kind of taken a backseat while I have been trying to keep my life under some type of control.

I decided to make some time to continue Part 2 of Chasing a Daredevil and Twins Before We Wed – Blogging Challenge. You can find Part 1 here, which goes through the progression of my marriage in pictures. Since I can’t post daily, I am posting to this challenge when I get time. Here is the challenge:

2. Share the story of the first homemade meal:

My husband and I are approaching our thirteen year wedding anniversary. That is a lot of homemade meals. Honestly, I can’t remember our first homemade meal or the story surrounding it. What I do remember is our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, which included a homemade meal, so I am going to discuss the story behind that meal instead.

My husband and I got engaged our senior year of college and married the summer after graduation. We both started at different law schools that fall and we lived off of student loan money. We were trying our best to navigate marriage as broke law students. Between classes, studying, and work, we didn’t eat many meals together.

We wanted to do something nice for our first Valentine’s Day together. However, Valentine’s Day was on a school night and we didn’t have money to go out. So my husband decided to prepare a surf and turf dinner for us after we got home from class that day. He cooked steak, lobster, twice baked potatoes, peas, and salad. I am not a big steak fan and I really don’t like lobster at all, but he worked so hard on that meal that I ate it and said it was great.

I remember how we took a break from studying in our tiny apartment to prepare and eat this meal. I remember sitting at our little two-person dining table with my husband, happy to be spending time together. I remember going back to studying some more after our dinner because we had class early the next morning…life keeps moving forward.

The years passed, we graduated, we found jobs, we changed jobs, we established financial independence, we grew as people.  Some of the changes have been good and others have not. I certainly don’t pretend to like surf and turf anymore just because my husband cooked it for me and maybe that is not such a good thing.

Looking back to that Valentine’s Day dinner years ago, my husband and I were willing to take a break from our responsibilities and just be together, enjoying each other’s company. The rest of the stuff, like law school responsibilities, the lack of money to go out to dinner, or the fact that I didn’t like steak and lobster, didn’t really matter. The words that come to mind when I think of that meal are peace and joy. It was a memorable meal, not because of the food, but because I stopped worrying about all my responsibilities and simply appreciated my husband. If only every meal could be like that.