Romance

Happy St. Valentine's Day! We are all sick here, so we kept things pretty low-key. I made chocolate-filled pastries for breakfast (which the kids hated) and a flourless chocolate-hazelnut cake with coffee ice cream for dessert (which the kids hated), and Chris whipped up some perfectly cooked delmonico steaks with a rosemary wine sauce for dinner (which the kids hated), so I would say that V-day around here was a success.

Claire began the day by inventing a song that has stuck in my head all. day. long. The lyrics are (frighteningly) as follows:
The girlfriends! And the boyfriends!
They love each other!
They love each other, and they marry each other!
Oh the girlfriends and the boyfriends!

Later that afternoon, Chris and I took advantage of a quiet moment to exchange cards. Every year we just write little letters to each other for Valentine's Day, so we both read our cards and then met in the middle of the kitchen to give each other a hug. As I went up on my tiptoes to give my husband a little kiss for Valentine's Day a voice suddenly piped out loudly from the bathroom beside us.
"I'm going to make a poopie!" yelled Abbie.
We paused, then smiled and rolled our eyes at each other before I went up on my tiptoes again.
"It's a big one!" immediately came that distinctive little voice, "Wow, it's pretty stinky in here!"

It was very romantic.

On top of everything else, poor little Lucy is very sick. She hasn't been sleeping well, and the poor thing has just been exhausted and frustrated all day. So here's a parting picture of tired little Lucy, asleep in her highchair just before dinner.

Notice, as well, how I've subtly managed to place that gorgeous flower arrangement in every picture? Chris very much so surprised me with that, as we usually really only do the card thing. (The flower delivery guy was impressed as well, I could tell, since he came to the front door: the door we never use because the path that leads to it was long ago reclaimed by the - muddy- earth, and the wooden steps that connect to it are, besides shedding half of the peeled white paint, warped and sagging, preventing the screen door from latching. So this man, in order to present me with this huge bouquet of flowers, had to stand on those rickety steps while I first had to kick all of the coats into the living room to access the door, and then had to un-do the bungee cord that we've tastefully employed to keep the screen door from flying away. I'm guessing that he was thinking the flower-money would have been better employed on other things, perhaps a bungie cord that doesn't clash with the decor. I was just happy with the flowers, though!)