Redeeming Disneyland on Valentines Day

Valentines Day has long been one of the lesser celebrated holidays in the home of the Butterworth's of Kirkland. We celebrated our first Valentines together in 1998 - Jesse (20) and Marisa (19) - at Disneyland and let's just say that the day went poorly and we almost didn't make it.

That year, my mom was kind enough to send us money to go to Disneyland for Valentines. We heard that there was a chance of rain but we thought that it wouldn't be a big deal. Afterall, it was Disneyland. It was supposed to be a happy place.

As we made the 20 minute drive from our college town of Azusa to Anaheim, it started sprinkling. But hey - we were young and in love. We thought that we would buy a couple of ponchos and hit the rides. How bad could it be? I am from Oregon and felt like I was used to the rain. Almost as soon as we entered the park, it started pouring and Disneyland's mainstreet started flooding. I could feel the water sloshing in my tennis shoes. I tried to have a good attitude. The lines were really short. We decided to walk over to The Matterhorn for our first ride. We immediately climbed into the ride and sat down. That is when I knew that I couldn't go on... I sat down in an inch or two of water and there wasn't anything that my Mickey Mouse poncho could do to help me. My butt and spirits were soaked.

My attitude quickly spiraled downhill as my jeans were now wet up to my knees from walking around the flooding park. I started whining to my new boyfriend that I didn't think that I could stay much longer. He was completely shocked and obviously irritated by my unwillingness to make our soggy day work. We started to argue... I started to cry in Frontierland... We decided to go home.

We barely spoke on our drive home and I felt myself getting angry that my boyfriend wasn't a little bit more understanding. I was completely soaked. I dropped him off at his apartment and went back to my dorm to shower and warm up. We decided to get back together later on in the afternoon and go to dinner.

After trying to get a reservation on Valentines Day didn't work out, Jesse decided to try to make me dinner with the only things in his fridge - eggs and bread. This was obviously a stressful thing for him but I thought that it was a sweet gesture for him to make us dinner at his place and we were both very broke. He made scrambled eggs and toast and it looked great. Unfortunately on the way from the kitchen to the dining room (2 steps) the eggs soaked through the plate and fell through to the floor. This led Jesse to an outburst like I had never seen before. He picked up the metal dining room chair and threw it across his apartment. I responded in typical motherly fashion by saying, "No. Uh uh. No." and wagging my finger back and forth in his face as if talking to a puppy I was trying to housebreak. I was totally disgusted and wondered what else Jesse had been hiding from me during our short time together. We salvaged what we could and ate in silence.

After calming down, we decided that we would scrape together whatever money we could find to go see a funny movie and try to redeem our day together. We watched "The Wedding Singer" starring Adam Sandler, laughed together and all was well between us.

This brings us back to present day... Jesse (30), Marisa (29), Liam (3 1/2) and Finn (7 months). We are coming up on Valentines Day 2008 (10 years later) and we will all be spending the day at Disneyland. The weather looks great and rain doesn't seem to be in the forcast. We are going to do our best to take back Valentines Day and make it what we always hoped that it could be.