My Perfect Valentines

I got to have dinner last night with my three perfect Valentines: my huzzband, my son, and my daughter. We had our "traditional" pizza with toppings in the shape of a heart, born of Boboli, pasta, salad and ice cream in fancy dishes. The kids gave me cards they made themselves -- my son made his out of origami, my daughter drew a cute picture of a tiger (she was born in the year of the tiger).
My husband skipped the card this year, undoubtedly because the line at Safeway was moving too slowly for him to get a card, too. I knew the "dozen" red roses were from Safeway before he told me, because there were fourteen stems -- and we all know that "at Safeway, a dozen roses means fourteen stems," as they so cheerfully state in their radio ads. Not that I was counting. Okay, I counted -- but only because I was wondering if he got them from Safeway or not.
He had an entertaining time in that line of men trying to buy roses. Almost as much fun as I had waiting in the See's Candy store line earlier that day. For the first time in my life, I saw somebody buying the seventy-something dollar ginormous Gift of Elegance box of chocolates. "I want to be his Valentine," I whispered to the woman standing next to me, and she nodded in agreement. None of us standing in line had ever received the Gift of Elegance, and since I did not run away with the mysterious man who bought it, I'm pretty sure I will never receive a box of chocolates that big. Which, actually, is okay. But I was pretty impressed to witness somebody actually buying that gargantuan box of chocolates. That man is a god among gift givers.
I managed to get my very tiny box of chocolates for my husband, and some lollipops for my kids. Went to the store to get the fixin's for our special dinner. Everything was last minute, since I had spent the previous two days lolling around the house, with the Almost-Flu. You know, the Almost-Flu: it's not quite the flu, but you've got most of the symptoms, and you're telling everybody it's not the flu because you don't want it to be the flu, plus you don't want your kids and all their friends to have the flu, so it better not be the Real Full-Blown Flu. After a couple days, you feel better, confirming that it was just some minor viral infection, a.k.a., the Almost-Flu.
Anyway, so I did not have the flu, but I was pretty sick, so I needed to get out of the house and buy some food for us to eat. Fortunately, I didn't have a demanding spouse to please, just a pretty easy to please family to feed a somewhat "special" meal. No reservations to make. No babysitters to hire. No jewelry purchases to worry about. It was a down home kind of Valentine's Day, and it turned out to be just perfect. The kind a kid will remember when they grow up. And the kind I will definitely remember for a long time.
Or at least as long as my memory holds out.