A Belated Valentine's Day Post

Lately, I have not been a fan of Valentine's Day. In fact, over the past few years, I've started looking at it as just another day, not getting what the huge deal was. Then I read this inspiring post by TB over at Year 31. She basically says that Valentine's Day should be spent celebrating all kinds of love, not just for couples. I am totally on board with this. And when I looked at Valentine's Day from that perspective, I started getting excited.

I was also envious of the awesome Valentine's Day crafts that she created with her son, and was finding myself regretting that I hadn't planned anything like that for Owen and Ben. But then she kindly pointed out to me that Valentine's Day wasn't here yet, so I still had time to do something. And I did. We totally winged it, but here's how Owen and I celebrated Valentine's Day:

Owen attends a playgroup at a local college that meets every Monday and Wednesday (two hours with just one child!) We were lucky enough to be assigned snack duty on Valentine's Day. We wanted to make something Valentine-themed, but unfortunately, the one time that I actually went to the store, I forgot to pick up decorating items for his snack. So, I improvised. His playgroup is in the morning, so I didn't want to do anything super sugary for snack. I settled on making apple muffins and disguised them as cupcakes. (I'm tricky like that sometimes)

We had some white frosting leftover from my birthday (it was still good, I read the label), and through a stroke of genius, I realized that we could use some strawberry Jell-O powder to color the frosting pink. I am brilliant. (And as an added bonus, the frosting became strawberry flavored!). Owen decorated the "cupcakes" with some red sugar leftover from Christmas cookies.

He likes to keep things centered.

The Single Dude's Valentine's Day Blues

As we all know, yesterday was Valentine's Day. It was a day to celebrate the people we love. For some people, it was all about couples. For others, it was about the kids. Unfortunately, it is also a day that many people resent; those people are usually single.

I watched an episode of How I Met Your Mother last night, and it was, of course, centered around Valentine's Day, or more specifically, the day before Valentine's Day, which Barney has so thoughtfully dubbed Desperation Day. ("It's a thing"). The focus was on single women who wear the mask and put up the facade of not caring about Valentine's Day because they don't need a man to make them happy, blah, blah, blah. Barney's theory is that February 13th is the day when a single "10" gains the desperation of a "4" and the eagerness of a "2" (or something to that extent), therefore making it an easy day to pick up hot women.

Source

Anyway. I think that it's time to focus on another type of person who always seems to be ignored on Valentine's Day, the lonely single guy. (Men have feelings too!)