Love is in the air, do you smell it? Smells like dark chocolate to me.
I don’t hate Valentine’s Day, but I’ve never been a huge fan of it until I became a mom and spent hours decorating shoe boxes with tissue paper and hearts and signing 62 miniature cards, and deciding “do we get all the classmates a box of candy hearts with messages of sexy love on them, or just for the special friends, but we’d hate leaving anyone out, wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings”, so I get the candy boxes for every tiny student and I leave the store spending a cool eighty bucks (I had to buy shoes because I didn’t have any shoe boxes either.) I’m a rule follower, when I’m not breaking them. Oh, and I bought myself some chocolate. It was 72% dark so it’s ok.
After gobbling the chocolate, we got home and put all of our wares on the kitchen table, crayons, markers, stickers, and glue, and, if we were lucky, GLITTER, and I decorated with my elementary aged munchkins until there was no more white space on those boxes. That lasted about 7 1/2 minutes.
Then we were all tired of it. But there were all those CARDS to sign! So we broke it up into manageable bite-sized segments. I had my son and daughter sign their names on 5 cards then take a break to do homework or read the Bible. I’m kidding. I didn’t make them do homework.
Funny, they seemed to get all their Valentine’s Day cards done in one sitting that way.
Last night I came home from being at the bar with my homies (again, I’m kidding, I don’t have homies), and my husband was changing all the light bulbs in the kitchen. He’s had back pain the last few days, but he was up on a stepstool, unscrewing the old bulbs, screwing in new. He’s my handyman; he fixes everything around here, and not only that, he maintains it all so that it won’t break down. Truth is, he likes these light bulbs called “flood lights”, making it nice and white and appearing as close to the sun as possible. That’s why I keep a pair of polarized sun glasses in my gadget drawer.
Why am I telling you all this? There are so many little things we do for each other that define what real love is and we often forget that. The kindnesses we show those we love, our closest ones, our spouses and children, mean the world to them. We should keep doing them. Keep cooking dinner, changing the light bulbs, doing glitter projects, staying up late helping with algebra (if that’s possible), keeping our anger in check, listening, reading to our children, whatever it is that defines love, do it.
Love isn’t only sending a sentimental card and flowers, it’s much more than that. It’s all the things you’ve done before and after the romance that matter, too. That’s sexy love.
Allison Stevens 