Be mine!

“Valentine’s Day is coming up!” I announced excitedly, as the kids and I drove down Tehachapi Boulevard. “And everyone knows what that means, right?”

“Hand cramps from writing ‘I love you’?” guessed my oldest son glumly, while my younger two went ballistic with excitement.

“That’s right,” I answered, confirming his worst nightmare as we pulled into the KMart parking lot. I had every intention of raiding the collection of school-age Valentine’s while the selection was still good. I could hardly wait to get inside to begin rummaging through their options. My oldest child looked on, horrified.

“What about these?” I asked holding up a Care Bear assortment pack.

“I can’t hand those out,” my younger son insisted. “They say ‘love’ on them – that’s gross.”

“I want the ‘Scream 3’ Valentine’s,” said my oldest son.

“Forget it!” I said snatching them from him.

“But they are hilarious,” he insisted.

“They are cool!” said my younger son, wide eyed with adrenaline.

I put them back on the shelf and, turning to my older son, assured him that his friend Christie wouldn’t like those ones.

“I’m not gonna give her a Valentine,” he said, dismissing the idea as unthinkable.

“Why not?” I asked. “I thought you liked her?”

“Well, I don’t want her to know that,” he said, staring at his shoes, as he scuffed them against the floor.

“You love her, you love her,” my little daughter began to chant. “You love her, you love her, you love...” I put my hand over her mouth to silence her and said to my son, “You don’t want her to think that you don’t like her.”

My little daughter batted her eyes, teasingly at him from behind my cupped hand and wrangling free, continued, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in a baby carriage!”

Try as I may, I couldn’t find anything wrong with that potential sequence of events, but still I pulled her behind me fearing for her little life. My younger son was curled up on the floor in utter hysterics.

While I was trying to calm my older son down, my younger two intercepted a young clerk as he walked by, “Do you have a Valentine card that we could give our Dad?”

He motioned toward the more masculine card section, flipping his black hair out of his eyes, and pointed inadvertently at a card with a duck on it, which they fell in love with immediately. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

We soon checked out of the store with probably six different varieties of valentine assortments with a total number of 280 valentines for the 60 or so kids we needed to buy for and were headed back to the car, when my older son and little daughter began pushing each other back and forth. Then he said to her teasingly, “Love is... putting up with you.” He added another little shove for emphasis.

She shoved him back and said, “Love is...Christie!” She then immediately began again to bat her eyes at him.

“You are awfully brave for two feet tall,” he warned her.

“That’s it,” I declared loudly. “No one is to talk about love, think about love, profess love or do anything loving. I don’t want to hear about any one of you ever wanting to get married or starting a family. If it has to do with love, you are not allowed to talk about it. Got it?”

Just then I noticed an older woman getting into the car parked next to us. She was giving me a dirty look and probably calling Social Services. I smiled meagerly at her.

Just then my daughter yelled, “K.I.S.S.I.N.G!” and the lady parked next to us smiled understandingly.

Happy Valentine’s Day, and remember talking about love, thinking about love and professing love all lead to consequences.

May your hearts be full and your consequences be many!