Keep the flowers -- let me sleep in!

We always spend Thursdays at my parents' house. This week my mom called and asked if we were coming to visit on Thursday. Thinking that it was a little early for the onset of dementia, I said, "We ALWAYS come on Thursdays."

"Oh," she said. "Well, I just wondered if you were going to visit this Thursday."

And you know, sometimes my mom takes a while to catch on to things, even if we've been driving down to her house on Thursdays SINCE FOREVER, so I tried not to sound too exasperated when I said, "Mom. We always. Visit. On Thursdays."

My mother, trying not to sound too exasperated with me, said, "I just thought you might have plans."

"Plans?" I said. Because I am the stay-at-home mother of a 9-month-old. By definition I have no plans.

"IT'S VALENTINE'S DAY!" my mother practically yelled.

"OH!" I yelped, wondering when it suddenly turned into February. "Nope! No plans!"

"Good," she said. "I can give Jack his valentine in person." And then she hung up and went to worry about my apparent early onset dementia with my father.

I was relaying this conversation to Phillip and we laughed a little and then we looked at each other worriedly. The pressure, you see. The pressure of needing to have plans for Valentine's Day.

We have had a romantic Valentine's Day or two. That one time when we were dating, and then the first year we were married when I made a fancy but somewhat inedible dinner using all our fancy wedding presents. But I'd have to say we're not so big on the giant boxes of chocolate and dozen roses. Not that I am against chocolate and roses -- hardly -- I just tend to demand them for my birthday, a much more important holiday than Valentine's Day.

This year, it seemed, the lace doily and stuffed animal holiday completely fell off the radar.

We're still going to visit my parents -- it's the only way we're guaranteed a babysitter -- but we won't be going to our restaurant of choice, because everyone else remembered it was Valentine's Day and made their reservations in a timely manner. So I'm not sure what we're going to do. (The only other restaurants in my parents' town are of the chain-sports-bar-and-burgers variety. Not terribly romantic options.)

Quite honestly, a fabulous Valentine's Day would involve my husband shuttling the baby off to the circus to the grandparents' while I lounge about with cucumber slices over my eyes, having the knots in my baby-hauling muscles pounded and stretched and rubbed into something resembling Jello.

Oh, you say I'm supposed to spend it with my husband? Celebrating our Love? Well, in that case, we can't think of anything more celebratory than the one thing we were wistfully discussing last night before we fell asleep, the one thing we wish for more than anything in the entire world: a day to sleep in. And! I will even qualify that by saying a day that we sleep in is a day that we wake up of our own accord- not because a small human being in the next room is impatiently dragging his tin cup across his crib bars.

If you have Valentine's Day plans, do share! You can be sure I won't have made any by the time I read your comments...

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