Hot Date

Since Brian and I were able to go to the temple for the first time in months last week in Buffalo I felt no guilt in going on a good old fashioned "dinner and a movie" date for Valentines Day. Of course, I hate the Valentines Day crowds so we had our Valentines date a day early. Our wonderful neighbor Claudia called and offered to watch the kids as a thank you for the random cable/electrical/wiring jobs Brian does for her. Ben had a rough day behaving that day and I had to pull him aside to chat about his behavior in the late afternoon. I told him he had been doing too much tantruming today and time out wasn't working today. He would have to now start losing a priviledge instead. I asked him what thing he liked and what privilidge he would need to lose. With a broken heart and tears streaming down his face he said, "To play with Miss Claudia when she comes to watch us and just go to bed." Boy did that work. He picked a major big ticket item to lose for tantrums and we didn't have a single outburst the rest of the day! Those kids love their Claudia! Brian and I searched our house for old gift cards to figure out what our Valentines Day date would be since we are still in "No Buy Month." The results weren't too shabby. $25 to Outback Steakhouse and two pre-paid movie tickets. Everyone knows you can't go to Outback on $25, so we spent $8.88. Oh well. At the movie, the show we had planned on watching was only playing in the "Directors Hall" which is fancy talk for leather seats and $3 extra per ticket. Whatever. So we got dinged another $6 for the movie. We had a nice evening just the two of us, oh yeah. We toted Jacob along all night because he's just not that hard to take yet. He cooed and laughed while we waited for dinner then slept most the rest of the night. After dinner we picked up Mali and Brent and saw the movie with them. It was a fun night.