Happy Valentine's Day

Here's a Valentine's Day greeting from the biggest sweetheart I know.

Over the weekend Braedan got the chance to celebrate Valentine's Day with some friends at the local library. We visit the library once a week for story time, and on Saturday they hosted a special story time with a craft project and snacks to get everyone ready for the big day. He had a great time as always listening to the stories and songs, but I think the added treat of a snack was his favorite part. As you can see from the picture below, he didn't have any trouble eating his cake and gold fish. With it being Valentine's Day, I am taking advantage of this opportunity to treat the hubby to a small gift today. We usually don't exchange gifts for Valentine's, but I've been wanting to find him this for a while now. When he comes home today, he will come face to face with the newest member of our family--Big Carl.

For those of you who don't know Big Carl, he makes frequent appearances on the show Cougar Town. He's helped the lead character of the show get through some good and bad times, and since the hubby and I have become bigger fans of wine, reds in particular, I thought it was time to welcome our own Big Carl into the family. Our top choice of red wine is the Yellow Tail Cabernet and the one featured with Big Carl here is the reserve Cabernet. If any you have some preferred red wines you enjoy, please let me know. We're always looking for new ones to try.

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you!

A little help, please

The inspiration behind this week's blog topic all started with none other than Braedan, and the direct source of this light bulb moment comes from the video I posted below. I'll explain more about that later, because aside from that incident three other things came to mind when I decided to write about this subject--a novel, the hubby and me. The novel I'm referring to is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. If some of you read, I imagine you're like me in that you do most of your reading at night before you go to bed. While reading The Help, my habit of nighttime reading became both a blessing and a curse, because with the book being so enjoyable I would get too engrossed and stay up way later than I should have reading more. If you're into historical fiction or wanting to find a different read than your norm, I recommend you check it out.

The inclusion of the hubby and myself within this help theme stems from our crazy decision to participate in Corpus Christi's Beach to Bay Relay Marathon, a team running event coming up this May. Luckily, we have a lot of time to prepare and we're running with four other friends so the average distance each of us must run is a little over four miles. In last week's post, I talked about how much I enjoy working out, but I don't always make the time to do it with all the running around with Braedan so I will definitely need a little help to take the time to prepare. The hubby, on the other hand, needs help in the motivation department. Once he gets started with working out, he is committed but getting him over that initial hump is the challenge. One of his best qualities is his quick wit, and back when I decided to do that first half marathon he offered encouraging words telling me I could definitely do it. I remember mentioning to him that we could maybe try to do it together, and instead of just replying with a simple "no," he of course didn't miss a beat and followed up with, "I will never pay to run." Well, this just goes to show that you should never say "never."

(I'm just happy that we'll finally get to do something like this together.)

And the biggest contributing factor for this post idea started with Braedan and his willingness to help. I can request simple tasks such as asking him to throw away a piece of trash or asking him to grab some clothes so that he can get dressed to go out. Never mind the fact that he might come back to me with only a pair of gym shorts when they're not appropriate for a day like today when it was 34 and the winds were gusting up to 30 mph. I at least know he understands and can follow directions. The funny thing is the day I recorded this video clip, he just started doing this activity on his own. I didn't ask him to do it, but it's nice to know that he can offer a little help when it's needed.