A Valentine’s Day to Remember

For as long as we’ve been married Matt has had one rule for Valentine’s – avoid restaurants. They always have long waits. Well this year, since Matt had the evening off and he’s ben doing well at work we decided to try out one of the local restaurants. So we headed out, little girls in tow, ready for a nice dinner together. As we drove up to the restaurant there weren’t many cars and their OPEN sign wasn’t on but decided to check it out anyway. We walked in and saw the scantily clad hostess and noticed the glassware on the tables. This should have been our first clue that we were not in a kid friendly place. We asked if they had any room for us, and after talking with the manager, they said they could fit us in without a reservation. So the hostess took us to the back of the restaurant, gave us our menus, and we realized once again we were in over our heads. They had a special menu just for Valentines – 4 course meals, including desserts, for way more money than we were planning on spending that night (or month) on eating out. By that time they had been so nice to squeeze us in that we felt bad if we just left. So we decided to make the most of it and had LOTS of eyes on us as we had our (almost)2 year old eating her goldfish crackers and chocolate milk on a fancy plate. She didn’t care for the expensive plate of pasta we bought for her. And our (almost) 2 month old decided she needed to be fed right after our second course. Luckily there were some chairs off to the side of the room where I could nurse her away from everyone trying to eat their nice meals. Our meals included antipasto (a platter with a variety of meats, ricotta cheese, and a chili relish. one of the meats tasted exactly like bologna. We thought that was kind of funny), cheesy garlic ciabatta bread, and hand tossed Caesar salad with crispy fried noodle things. I got the chicken piccata with whipped potatoes and Matt got the steak and baked potato. For dessert I had the mixed berry cheesecake and Matt got the crème brulee. Everything was delicious and wonderfully presented. We looked at each other several times thinking “what are we doing here? We should be across the street at the burger place! Not in this fancy restaurant.” But the girls did remarkably well and we were able to have a decent dinner without too many crumbs on the floor or spilled water on the table. We were quite proud of ourselves. We were so full from all the food that we decided to go walk it off at the mall and Lily loved playing in the play area while we laughed about how funny that must have looked to see our family of four among all the love birds having their fine dining experience! This will definitely be a Valentine’s we won’t soon forget.