My friend Brittany over at A Healthy Slice of Life had this as the topic of her post yesterday, and I loved it!  It got me thinking and remembering moments in my own relationship so…in honor of Valentine’s day I decided to borrow it from her 🙂   

1. How long have you and your significant other been together?  7 and a half years and counting!

2.  How’d you meet (What’s your “love” story?)  My best friend and I were trying to decide whether we were going to move  here or to Atlanta after we graduated from College in 2004 and we were in town visiting for a weekend in May.  We went to a friend of a friends house to “pre-game” (they knew each other from OU) and Carly and I were just hanging out talking on the porch when in walked this tall, dark and handsome man (solo may I add) who didn’t even stop to say hello or introduce himself, rather just beelined into the apartment and sat down at a table in the back with his buddy.  I immediately thought he was rude and unfriendly and really didn’t think about him again until we got to the bar and all of a sudden his liquid courage settled in and he offered to buy us shots, and beers, and probably a few more shots 😉  After we had a few drinks he finally came up to me and introduced himself and we hit it off.  We danced at Buckhead and talked and then walked back to our friends apartment together because the cab was full , and had our first kiss at a crosswalk.  We hung out for the remainder of the night and exchanged numbers but he didn’t call….for a while.  Actually he accidently called me (when he meant to call his friend Jim one night several weeks later) apparently our names were next to eachother in his phone book.  He was slightly intoxicated and swore he tried texting me a few times before (but I didn’t have texting on my phone yet so I never knew)  However he called the following day…sober 🙂 and we began our courtship over the phone and internet. Carly and I decided that Charlotte was going to be the place for us and the Friday after I moved (August 20, 2004) Dan and I had a date set up.  He brought me a bottle of wine (which had never happened to me before) and took me to a restaurant uptown called Harry and Jean’s.  We had a very nice dinner and he dropped me off afterwards.  He was to meet up with his friends and Carly and I were headed out as well.  We ended meeting back up later that night and the rest is History!

I remember Carly being so bummed because we were new to the city and hoping to have a while of being single together and lots of time to meet and date different guys but Dan wowed me in every way possible and I was smitten immediately! 

3.  If married…How long have you been married?  We celebrated 2 years of marriage this past September 5th

4.  Where did you get married?  Big or small wedding?  We got married in Willoughby Hills, Ohio at Manakiki Country Club on Saturday September 5th 2009.  It was a pretty big wedding with about 235 people and a picture perfect day

5.  Do you have any nicknames for eachother?  He sometimes calls me QT, I call him babe

6.  Name 3 things you love about your honey.  It’s hard to pick only 3 but He is one of the hardest working men I’ve ever met in my life.  He does so much to make sure our family has everything we need and that Garrett and I are taken care of.  He’s extremely intelligent.  So much so that he’s earned the nickname Ernie from several of our friends 🙂 He knows so much about so many things and if he doesn’t know the answer to a question he reads until he figures it out. I learn from him every day.  He’s an AMAZING father.  Honestly before we had Garrett I had never really seen him around babies, so I didn’t know what to expect, although I had no doubt he’d be great.  He’s patient, and caring, and loving and he is as amazed by our little man as I am.  I couldn’t ask for a better husband or father to our son.

7.  Tell us how he proposed.  Dan is anything but cliche so when he proposed to me on Valentines Day 2009 I was completely shocked.  We had been dating for 4.5 years before he popped the question but lived together for 3.5 and I wanted it to happen and thought it would at some point…I just didn’t know when and I was getting a little antsy 😉  One of our favorite things to this day is to cook together and drink a great bottle of wine.  He’s an amazing cook and we had a very nice bottle of wine that we’d had for 3 years but were “saving” for a special occasion.  I didn’t even know he’d taken it from our wine rack on Valentines Day when we both set out to run a few errands.  We said no gifts so when he handed me a box before dinner I was a little perturbed.  He insisted that I open it before we ate so I obliged.  It was a box from Crate and Barrel and inside of it there was a wine decantuer (which we actually needed) so I wasn’t too bothered anymore.  However, next to the decanteur was a bottle wrapped in tissue paper.  It was our “special” bottle.  A 1998 Bottle of Grgich Hills Cabernet Sauvignon and when I turned around he was down on his knee in our dining room and asked me to marry him ❤

8.  Is he a flowers and teddy bear kind of guy for v-day, or strawberries, champagne, and rose petals?  More of a card and nice dinner kind of a guy although he likes to change it up here and there 🙂

9.  Are you a sunset dinner on the beach kind of girl or pop a movie in and relax on the couch?  Definitely have the opportunity to be the pop in a movie and relax on the couch more than a sunset dinner on the beach.  Not to say I don’t enjoy both 🙂

10. Tell us one thing you’d like to do with your significant other one day. If you could do anything? Go anywhere?  So much.  Raise our family and put them through college, and travel as much as possible.  I’d like to take our family to Germany one day

11.  Tell us what you plan on doing for Valentine’s Day.  Cooking dinner, putting our baby to bed, and relaxing with a glass of wine by the fire.

12.  Are you asking for anything this Valentine’s Day?  Nope, I have everything I could possibly wish for!

13. Give us one piece of advice for keeping a relationship strong and full of love.  Don’t forget to put yourselves first, take time to talk and make sure you are on the same page.  Dream together, work as a team and love unconditionally

14.  Show us a picture of what love means to you

Happy Valentine’s Day!