When We Say We're Not Doing Anything Special for Valentine's Day...

...we're probably lying.  Okay, not intentionally.  We talked about whether or not we wanted to do anything for Valentine's Day and decided not to, since we both kind of think it's a lame, made-up holiday (invented by Chaucer, but I won't get into my lit crit explanation of that).  Since we decided not to do anything, we of course ended up having a very special Valentine's Day.

I decided that in lieu of going out to eat, I would surprise Cy with a *fancy* (fancy for us) homemade dinner that he really likes.  I broke out the fine china to set the table, and cooked a meal of smothered steak (cube steak cooked in gravy made from golden mushroom soup), noodles, green beans, and peanut butter pie for dessert.  We are not really drinkers, so we had some sparkling grape juice.

Meanwhile, Cy's idea of not doing anything special consisted of him surprising me with a chocolate strawberry cupcake from Cupcake and a beautiful pink-and-green bracelet from Handpicked that he made himself!  He said to me: "I literally hand-picked this bracelet for you."

Gemma got a present too: I had seen these cute Valentine sock monkeys at Wal-Mart and scooped them up weeks earlier.  Cy let her pick which one she wanted, and I got the other one.  Gemma picked the red one and proceeded to eat it.

We enjoyed our "nothing special" evening very much!