Valentines Day... Not Perfect, But Still Good

If I lived in a picture perfect world, Valentines Day might look something like waking up to a spotlessly clean house and breakfast in bed. My children would all dress themselves, in cute, clean outfits, where the pants and shirts matched, because they'd know I wanted them to look good for pictures. (And I'd have the photography skills to make them look good, too!) They would play together nicely and calmly all morning while I did some baking and dinner preparations. Aaron would come home early with a gorgeous bouquet of flowers. We'd all sit down to a five star dinner, the children would be polite and make nice conversation. No one would spill anything. Then they'd run off happily to bed without a fight. Aaron and I would enjoy a wonderful romantic evening without any interruptions. And to top it off, the dish-fairy would come and make all the dirty dinner dishes disappear. Sounds good, eh?

Well, in real life my kids all got up way too early. They didn't dress themselves, and since they're still fighting colds, they have snot constantly running down their faces and drying there. I didn't ever get around to doing Adelia's hair and I couldn't find the cute outfits I wanted them to wear anyway. My house was a disaster area, like we probably should have put up caution tape. And while I was baking and trying to get things ready for dinner, I kept having to pause to do things like: mop up the floor after a child spilled the container of prune juice (why do we even HAVE prune juice, I'd like to know! Something to do with kids helping with shopping...), pick up an entire bowl of popcorn someone spilled (ya, this was after I mopped once already), break up fights, change the laundry, scrub out a pair of poopy underwear and bathe a child because he didn't make it to the bathroom fast enough, and so on. I never got around to putting up cute decorations. I never got around to dipping the strawberries I bought in chocolate. I never even got around to writing a card for Aaron. After the kids went to bed, Aaron and I folded laundry to make room on the bed, then I fell asleep while he gave himself a hair cut. We didn't even drink the sparkling cider that I actually remembered to put in the fridge yesterday so it would be cold. And I stopped believing in the dish-fairy years ago.

But you know what? I had a wonderful Valentines Day. My house was messy, but my husband made us a wonderful breakfast of grits and cinnamon rolls. He even made the grits into a heart shape. There were a lot of things I wanted to do that didn't get done, but I did do a lot of the things I wanted. I tried a new recipe and made a FABULOUS three layer Black Forest Cherry Cake from scratch, whipping cream and all. The dishes didn't disappear, but we ate an excellent steak dinner, with homemade steak fries, and a hand tossed salad. The kids weren't angels all day, it's true, but they were impressed with the Kool-Aide heart-shaped ice cubes I made for them to put in their Sprite at dinner. My husband didn't come home early, but he didn't come home late either, and he did surprise me with a very large bouquet of beautiful red roses that smell heavenly. We didn't have what some people might call a particularly romantic evening, but after 11 days of Aaron on a business trip, I'm so happy to have him home that, yes, even folding laundry together is good enough for me. 

President Uchtdorf said at the First Presidency Christmas Devotional, “We have in our minds a picture of how everything should be—the perfect tree, the perfect lights, the perfect gifts, and the perfect family events. … [But] sooner or later, something unpleasant occurs … and the picture-perfect Christmas we had imagined, the magic we had intended to create, shatters around us.” He was talking about Christmas, obviously, but I think we can apply this to all kinds of holidays and life events. So often, I find that I do have a picture-perfect image of how I think something should go. But things rarely ever come out looking like a Halmark card, ya know? When I focus on everything that went wrong, the things that prohibited me from obtaining the picture-perfect whatever-it-is, I have a really hard time seeing all the things that went right.

And so, I'm glad I had a minute to think about this Valentines Day. I'm glad it wasn't perfect, and I'm even more glad that I could recognize the good things that happened, and still come to the conclusion that it was an over-all good day. I'll stop yapping now, and share my very unprofessional photographs of the event. :)