A Big Box for Valentine's Day.

This past Sunday morning, the day before Valentine's Day, we were all in the kitchen, enjoying moments that were just overflowing with family-ness. We had just finished having blueberry pancakes, I was feeding Walker mashed banana, and the dogs were circling uncomfortably close to a certain baby who had mashed banana all over his face, hands, and bib. The house was in what is now a constant state of complete disarray. We are at the point where we think if we gathered all the stray dog fur from around the house and combined it with some glue we could make ourselves a cat. Anyway. Since returning to work I have trained myself long and hard to just ignore the state of the house as much as possible. Otherwise I end up going into extremely long and tedious monologues about how I can't deal with chaos and the house is ruining my life. The whole house situation has actually been one of the hardest lessons of new parenthood. To let the house go. Just let it go. It seems so obvious, but in practice it's a whole other ball of jacks. So I was feeling proud of myself that I was just letting life happen, that we had actually all had breakfast together (a hot breakfast, no less), that the house was appropriately chaotic and that we even had big plans to leave the house in a couple of hours to go check out an art gallery and have some hot chocolate.

Right around this time, Jon was surveying the kitchen. Looking at the stacks of stuff on the kitchen table, the piles of hats, gloves, and boots strewn around. His eye settled on our kitchen chairs where 2 out of 3 of them had jackets thrown on them. Most of them mine. And he piped up, out of the blue, with this gem:

"Do you think we can do something about these coats today?"

I put the spoon down with the mashed banana on it. Not only was his tone uncharacteristically bitchy but he had also used The Royal We, clearly meaning could I in all my laziness please put my damn coats away already. My jaw set itself askew. My teeth ground themselves down. I was silent, mostly because what I was thinking of saying would be so rude and then the more I thought about it, it started getting sort of funny. I narrowed my eyes at him, almost in disbelief and blinking un-comprehension but with a glimmer of punchiness.

He looked at me, started laughing, and revisited a Christmas request I had by asking, "Are you about to ask me for a Big Box of Zip It for Valentine's Day?" (for Christmas I had asked for a stocking full of Zip It, to be precise).

And I said, "Well. That's a lot more diplomatic than what I had in mind. I was thinking more along the lines of How About A Big Box of Shut The Fuck Up?"

And they say romance is dead.