Valentine's Day & Fire Drills

So what exactly do Valentine's Day & Fire Drills have in common?

Nothing. Unless you're me, and then you have the odd ability to make crazy things happen when you least expect or desire them to. My skill set here is amazing, but that's a story for another day.

So here's how it all went down.

We decided not to do anything fancy-schmancy for Valentine's Day this year; so instead, we planned to go to dinner and agreed that anything we did do would just be simple and heart felt. We were stoked about going to dinner, mainly because on special occasions we consider going outside the typical "spending zone" meaning we got to go to one of our favorite restaurants in the world I think...

We avoided the craziness of Utah restaurants and their no reservation policy and decided to go on Thursday before Valentine's Day weekend. I love this idea and would apply it to almost any holiday because it means that you get to spread out the celebration and have more fun than if you agreed to only do things on the specified day.  Anyway, dinner was super yummy and we enjoyed the evening out. 

I still wanted to do something sweet for Benj, so I decided to get up and make breakfast for him on V-Day. He had to work that morning, but that was ok with me... I could definitely get up and have breakfast ready for him to eat before 6AM right? 

What was I thinking!? Do you know how early a 6AM deadline feels like when you've spent the majority of the last week pulling late nights and early mornings and stressing over what appears to be the craziest 2 weeks of the last semester of your MBA program thus far? Despite my exhaustion, I was determined to succeed on this, so I planned the breakfast and told Benj about my idea so he could anticipate the moment rather than just be rushed that morning on his way to work. 

5AM came early as usual, and I jumped out of bed as my alarm went off and hustled to the kitchen to quietly fix breakfast while Benj caught a few more zzzz's. This was definitely a breakfast I was capable of... pink heart pancakes with strawberries & cream, bacon, and fresh squeezed orange juice. The pancakes were turning out super cute, the bacon was crisping up nicely on the broiler pan in the oven (I had just opened the over door to check on it) and was working on snapping a quick picture of these little beauties, when I was greeted with the shrill sound of our smoke detector...ahhhhhh!

Somewhere in all the multi-tasking that was occurring in my exhausted state and in the wee hours of the morning, I had forgotten that ventilation was a necessity in our basement apartment when cooking such things as... well, bacon. My opening the oven door had produced just enough smoke that our smoke detector thought it was time to tell the world of its capabilities. I grabbed a dish towel and started waving it furiously to get the smoke away from the little beast. Then it dawned on me that our incredibly great upstairs neighbors had sleeping children and probably thought their house was burning down because they could hear our smoke detector. It was only a matter of seconds that the darn thing had been going off, but I panicked at that thought & opened our bedroom door to call Benjamin to the rescue. 

Poor prince charming leapt from his bed, but the gush of air that came from me pushing our bedroom door open silenced the smoke detector almost instantly. So there we both stood, me in my panic and Benj looking half asleep yet ready save the day once he figured out exactly what I was chattering on about. 

I just smiled, gave him a peck on the cheek and told him to go back to sleep for the next 5 minutes before his alarm went off. 

The picture of the pancakes is terrible, but you can take the poor lighting as proof that it really was snapped just as that beastly smoke detector went off. I guess I could have taken another one, but then Prince Charming woke up, smothered his pancakes with strawberries & cream and devoured them. He was also kind enough to laugh at the early morning wake up call and just shook his head as I acted out the whole thing while he ate breakfast. Sometimes I think he wonders about his crazy wife, but at least I keep his life exciting!