Our Valentine's Day Celebrations

As usual, we had a lot of fun with Valentine's Day this year. Besides doing the traditional doorbell ditching of fresh cookie Valentines to as many friends as we could, we also had fun doing things for each other.

Nate, being the amazing and wonderful husband he is, decided to surprise me this year with a pair of soft cozy slippers and a chocolate rose for the occasion. He also found a  fun pair of Valentine socks for me since he noted that I have socks specifically for other holidays, but not Valentine's Day. I was pretty happy about these surprises, but I was especially ecstatic about this one:

 

Nate made butterscotch cheesecake for us to eat for dessert. He ended up making two: a large one, and a mini heart shaped one just for me. He even wrote on the top of it with chocolate syrup, "I [heart] U." Not only did it look great, it tasted scrumptious!

This year I also did a Valentine advent project of sorts for Nate. I found a pattern online for this paper cube puzzle:

Including the top and bottom pieces that help hold the cube together, there are a total of fourteen pieces. There also just happen to be fourteen days between the beginning of February and Valentine's Day. And Nate likes puzzles and such like this, so it was perfect.

I did some searching and thinking and came up with fourteen things or "Building Blocks" that are important for a good marriage. Most of them were taken from "The Family: A Proclamation to the World," and the rest were ideas taken from various talks on marriage that I read. These "Building Blocks" included trust, faith, prayer/temple attendance/scripture study, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, learning/growing/progressing, love, compassion, communication, and wholesome recreation.

I found quotes from scriptures, talks, and articles about each of these things, and made them into little notes to go along with each cube piece. The points were not in any particular order, except for the first and the last things: trust and wholesome recreation. Trust was the first piece, the black base of the cube which creates the foundation for the puzzle just as it creates a foundation for any good marriage. Wholesome recreation was the top piece. I think wholesome recreation is almost like the cherry on top of a relationship so to speak, and it does a lot more for a relationship if the other elements are in place, which is why I put it there. If anyone ever wants to use the notes or the quotes on them, just follow the link below:

Quotes

I must add that the cube is definitely pretty time consuming to construct. But it worked out so well for this Valentine's Day advent. I hid a piece of the cube with its correlating note each day for Nate to find as he went about his normal activities.