Yesterday was the Valentine's Day Party at kindergarten. I love those kids. Most of them. Who else is so thrilled to make crowns from paper plates? Who else so delights in seeing their name on a BINGO sheet and immediately hangs glow sticks from their ears? Who is else is so unselfconscious(is that a real word? You may think I should know, but I don't) that they clamour for hugs and line up to give them?


Mort and I have been making Valentines over the past week or so. Save for the last two that became a struggle of me begging, bribing and coaxing him to write his name until he suddenly had a happy change of heart and decided to turn them into baseballs and footballs, we had a lot of fun. We grabbed a pile of scrap paper and construction paper and we cut hearts of every shape, size and color. (Oh, yes, when you have the two of us crafting, hearts can take on varied shapes). We glued on wrapping paper and letters. Mort drew and colored and wrote across them. We giggled. We marveled. It was a nice time.

And yet I was surprised when he opened his bag 'o Valentines last night and discovered all the other cards were store-bought. And that made me sad. Not because the other kids didn't hand make their Valentines, because that doesn't matter, but rather because it made me wonder if next year Mort wouldn't want to make his either . Will he want to skip it and pick out his favorite super hero cards instead? Did we just have our last year of making Valentines and I didn't even know it? I hope not. I hope it was fun enough to him that we have more years of doing this before he finally looks around and announces he wants to do what everyone else is doing.

And yes, I fully recognize that will happen at some point. Obviously it happens to everyone or else all these people wouldn't be wearing skinny jeans when I have come across only two people in all of America who actually look decent while doing so. I thought the extra big pants were a silly trend, but skinny jeans---no one looks good. And all the kids are wearing them. Have been wearing them for years. It's time to face facts and make this go away. In fact, I was complaining about this to my sister and loudly declaring how no one can look good in skinny jeans (are we sensing I may have the teeniest bit of I-look-like-an-overstuffed-sausage-in-skinny-jeans envy? Yes, make no mistake about it. There has never been a day in my life where I could have acceptably donned skinny jeans without ending up in the pages of Vice.) Anyway, my sister seemed puzzled by my claim and replied that she's seen people who look great in them. I just assumed she was lying. And then later that day I met two of her friends. Both of whom were so tall I looked directly at their shoulders. Both of whom seemed to be wearing no make-up and yet looked like they had stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine. They were jaw-dropping, double-take gorgeous. They weren't even related to each other. Two different families of gene pools had the capacity to produce this kind of phenomenon. And needless to say, they both wore skinny jeans. As they well should.

Sometimes I like to step back and marvel at how I started writing about Valentines in the world of kindergarten and finished up with how amazing skinny jeans look on some of my sister's friends.

Duke and I rented a movie last night. We both fell asleep during it. And then Mort beat us both at Go Fish this morning. We suspect he cheated, but we were too not-yet-caffeined to figure out the scam.