A Valentine's Day First

For our first Valentine's Day, Mark proposed. Not at some swanky restaurant, not over champagne, not with flowers in one hand and chocolate in the other. I was teaching a developmental biology lab course and had several projector slides to show examples of chicken organ tissue. The last slide was supposed to be the final example of a particular region of the liver. Instead, up popped the words "Kellie, will you marry me?" Mark, who was my "assistant" TA for this lab section, got down on a knee and held up a ring. My first thought? Honest to God, I looked at that slide and, even though we had already decided to get married a couple weeks before and even though we had even picked out the ring together that weekend, I frowned and thought, "That's not the liver." My students thought it was a joke. Mark and I had been living together for the entire course to that point (OK, so it was a whopping four weeks), but they had no idea we were even dating.

Now here we are five years later. We've done the fancy dinner thing, the flowers thing, the chocolate thing, the "naughty undergarment" thing, and the jewelry thing. (Actually, Mark gives me jewelry for just about every birthday, anniversary, and holiday he can afford to. Not so much because he thinks he ought to give me jewelry or even because he wants me to have it, but more because he loves geology and gets a big kick out of looking at unique stones. Last night he gave me a beautiful pink rhodocrocite slice.) Last year was very low-key as I was suffering through morning sickness and the idea of chocolate was enough to make me green at times. This year was set to be low-key as well since the Drewmeister's around and we don't exactly have a long list of baby-sitters. But this V-day took a unique turn even for us.

I'll be going to the dentist, hopped up on valium, finally taking Step 2 in the root canal from hell--the seating of the crown. Step 3 will be two to four weeks from today when they actually screw that sucker into my jaw. I'm sure there are less romantic things than spending a Valentine's Day evening with your numb-lipped, drooling, spaced-out-on-drugs sweetie, but I can't think of them at the moment.