Nat is leaving tomorrow for the Bay area. He’ll be there until Wednesday night attending a conference. On Monday, he’ll be giving a presentation. Nat has been very nervous about this, so please pray for him.
While Nat’s in the Bay area, he’ll be able to visit three of his good friends. Hopefully, this will take his mind off the presentation. 
Nat and I both had sad days today. For me, I had two conversations that put me in a rut, a very unhappy Sean at various points in the day, and a long dinner with a overtired Sean. For Nat, he struggled with his presentation that he’s giving at a conference at the end of this month. This, in turn, led to Nat feeling like he is a bad researcher.
To top things all off, we both didn’t have a celebratory Valentine’s Day. It being “Valentine’s Day” is nothing special to us, but it just so happens to be the day that we started dating. We didn’t plan to start dating on Valentine’s Day, honest; it just turned out that way. I knew that Nat had been very busy preparing his talk, but I wanted to give him a little something. I was hoping for a little something, but I was truly okay with not receiving anything.  Well, when Nat got his little surprise this morning, he felt so sad that he hadn’t gotten me anything. He felt like such a bad husband. I told him that he wasn’t; plus, he was taking me out to dinner, so that’s something! But the funny thing was that as Nat kept expressing how bad he felt, I started feeling upset about not getting anything. Strange, huh? In the end, we were able to talk about how I felt and how he felt. Through our conversation, I was reminded of how much Nat loves me, and how he doesn’t need to get me anything to prove it. I also love how I can be so honest with Nat about how I was feeling. I must say, that being able to share my heart and have Nat’s love turned out to be the best and most precious “little something” that he could give me.
It snowed 6-8 inches last night. When we put Sean down for a nap this morning, Nat and I went out to shovel the driveway. I was scared that it was going to take 3 hours like it did last year. Fortunately, it didn’t take as long this year because 1) I’m not pregnant so I could help 2) the snow wasn’t as wet and heavy and 3) Nat learned from last year that it wasn’t worth it to do a super thorough job.  We were done with the driveway in less than an hour! 
 If we were going to stay in the Midwest or some place that snows a lot, I would definitely invest in a snow blower.