"First Date Celebrate".......#19

We don't celebrate Valentine's Day in this house. We watch the world frantically shop for tokens, order too expensive flowers and struggle for a reservation and compete for decent babysitting coverage. We wait until March 6th.

The LAST "First Date" of our lives......March 6th 1993.

Not only was it a first date but a blind one at that. I do have to add that we both served as missionaries in the Rosario Argentina Mission and had actually spoken to each other a few times but I didn't remember that. Guy had heard from a mutual friend that I was going to BYU in Provo, Utah and thought it might be fun to hang out with someone from the mission field. He cold called me, the brave soul, and set the bait...I mean...the date.

He drove an hour down from Bountiful to pick me up and took me all the way back because our first stop was a birthday party for one of his close friends. We had a blast with a colossal rubber band fight throughout the whole house. It was nice to meet and greet the friends while trying to shoot them in the face. He definitely kept things casual.

Our next stop was eating dinner here. This is the restaurant Guy worked in his whole high school career. He scrubbed pots all night long, every night. If you are ever in Salt Lake City, drive the 20 minutes north and enjoy an amazing dinner!

The food was amazing. The conversation was compelling. We couldn't stop talking. Afterwards he drove me by the construction site of the Bountiful LDS Temple. I had never seen a temple site like this and it was amazing especially since the view is spectacular. An excellent spot for smooching.... but we weren't there yet.

It was a long night of fun and frivolity and we still needed to drive all the way to Provo and get me home. We stopped in Salt Lake to see the temple there since I had never been there at night. At the time, Guy was volunteering his time on Saturdays there and
I thought that was fascinating.

We made it to Provo and ended up talking until 3 in the morning. I had had a fabulous time. Guy told me all his corniest jokes and my simple mind found them outrageously funny. It was a fabulous date. Three months later..we were married.

And so every year we celebrate the beginning of US. We find a great Chinese restaurant and try to relive our thoughts and feelings from those short weeks of dating. Mostly we laugh at how insanely naive and immature we were to hook up so quickly, so young and so uninformed about each other. I'm happy to report that we have worked very hard to learn to love each other well, to face terrible challenges as partners and to bless our children with good parenting and enormous amounts of time and attention.