Valentine’s Day Miscellany

1. Like my multipurpose tablecloth? My son needed to decorate a shoebox for Valentine’s Day, so I bought a 97-cent tablecloth to use a piece of to wrap around the box. When we finished, it just seemed a shame to waste the rest of it, so we breakfasted atop the remains, politely ignoring the missing corner piece.

2. Remember the 22 bags of post-Christmas chocolate we recently purchased, and my reference about repurposing the red and silver kisses for Valentine’s Day? Done. All three small people picked out the red and silver kisses and taped them to their valentines. Guess who gave them the idea?

3. My Valentine’s Day reading is Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, about Ernest Hemingway’s wife Hadley. I suspect the story would be a far more romantic read if I weren’t painfully aware of the fact that she was, in fact, but the first of four wives for a man who apparently preferred convoluted relationships over convoluted sentences. Knowing that, it’s really difficult to read it with any sort of feelings appropriate for this day. However, so far I am enjoying it, and while it is first and foremost a novel, the historical references are quite interesting to those of us with a penchant for American writers and their generally miserable lives.

4. Since my eldest son is sick and my marital consort is committed to a working dinner of sorts, I’ve decided to ditch even the Hamburger Helper. My younger son, who will now consume the largest portion of the meal, loves “breakfast” dinners only slightly less than “snack” dinner. So, we will feast on pancakes, turkey bacon and broccoli. My personal nutritional philosophy, in case you care to know, involves the belief that all food is permissible if accompanied by broccoli. How else do you think “snack” dinners were birthed?

5. The laugh of the day came today when my daughter got home from preschool and showed us this.

“Someone gave me a whoopee cushion for Valentine’s Day!” she exclaimed. My son, lying until then languidly on the couch recovering from the flu, sat up to look and started laughing. “Well, it’s definitely the shape of one, but I don’t think anyone really gave you a whoopee cushion for Valentine’s Day. It’s not going to make the sound,” he explained. She appeared to accept his point, but then when her other brother came home later in the afternoon with his Valentine’s Day stash, she was excited all over again about the “whoopee cushion” he received. And now that the idea is in his head, naturally my younger son wants to give out whoopee cushions to all his friends for Valentine’s Day next year. This bodes well for me for this evening, as he is the male I will be spending the largest part of my Valentine’s night with.

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.