More fun with Children

It’s Valentine’s day which means that the internet is swamped with words about love and un-love and grumbles and cheers–wait, maybe every day is Valentine’s Day on the internet?–but we’re mostly all cheese around these parts. I know, I know, the shock is overwhelming.

The thing is, all of this stuff, the holidays, the festivals, the stuff that we learned to roll our eyes about at some point, it’s all SO much more fun when there’s a kid to share it with. This morning we woke up and smothered Asher with kisses and told him that he was our Valentine and let him have a little chocolate before breakfast and it was just so much more fun than the average Tuesday morning. Asher is really excited about giving out the Valentine’s that he made to his friends today and I’m really excited about being able to come to his classroom with my mom this afternoon and just be in his world for a little while. If that’s not the definition of celebrating a day about love, I don’t know what is.

We typically make things for each other for these kinds of holidays to make it more reflective of what we want it to be about. Last year Drew gave me a a gorgeous painting that he did of a heart (of the anatomical variety) blooming into a flower. I gave him a little collage/shrine box made with some of his words to me. This year I can’t tell you what we’re getting and giving, but I can tell you that I stitched together a little red felt heart with an A on it to slip into Asher’s pocket. He’s obsessed with the letter A (can’t say that I disagree, it is a pretty awesome letter) and runs around pointing out all of the A’s that he sees, so this morning he was very happy to point to the A on the heart because “A is for Asher!”.

I get it. I get why Valentine’s Day (or as our cousin Daniel aptly called it–Singles Awareness Day) is an easy target for cynicism. But I also get that I am going to be an old lady one day, closer to the end of my life than the middle or the beginning, and I am almost certain that the only potential for regret that I might have in those days will be wishing that I told the people that I loved how deeply I cared for them more often. Having a day to reflect on this doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at all, now does it?

Here’s to thinking about all of the ways that love and un-love and deep love and lustful love and compassionate love and empathetic love and graceful love and ugly love and motherly love and self love and so many other loves has changed our lives. xoxoxo