The Real Valentines

And here we are! Congratulations on making it through another Valentines Day....glad to see everyone survived....mostly.

Valentine's Day has always been a holiday I love to love to hate. Every day following up to Valentines day makes me absolutely dread it. The thought of all that lovey romance crap that I don't have or seeing people with flowers and treats can seriously make a person sick. However I had an epiphany today.....Valentines is exactly the opposite!!!

My kids taught me a valuable lesson today! As I was tuning instruments today I had kids walking in with all their cute tshirts and valentines boxes and was taken back to my elementary years where I was so excited to pick out the perfect valentine to give to that secret crush that I had. I had some kids super excited to see who would send them special valentines, some who couldn't wait to eat all the candy and some that flat out hated the thought of all this love going on. Well as I was tuning I had quite a few kids, in both classes, come up and give me some valentines! If I had been sitting in a chair I would have jumped out of it because I was so excited! It dawned on me that valentines is not about all this romantic love crap but about the love you have for everyone!

I have always been a hopeless romantic, which is why I usually hate Valentines because well.....I have never had a boyfriend, heck I have barely had a hand full of dates and have only ever kissed one boy...Valentines has never been one of my top woo hoo days, but today as my kids handed me those Valentines I seriously could have cared less about any boy at that moment! Knowing that I have made some kind of difference to them, and that they don't hate me, meant a lot! At the end of my second class, my kids were hopped up on loads of sugar, so we had a fun day and as we were going out I had one of my girls just wrap her arms around my waist and give me the biggest hug I have had in a long time. And it was no ordinary hug...the best way to describe it was that she squeezed all the stuffing out of me and then look right up at me and said Happy Valentines Day and kept squeezing!

Valentines Day is a day to show those you care about how much you care about them and how much you appreciate them. Yes, it is all about love, but today I have learned and really been shown that it is about family love, friend love, roommate love, student love, and just about any kind of love you can think of. Valentines day, even though it focuses mainly on it, does not have to be centered around romantic love, even though that is nice.

It's been a day where I have realized how blessed and lucky I am to be where I am with the people that I know. I have the greatest family, the bestest friends, the awesome-est roommates, the funnest students and just great people in my life. I spent my day teaching, in class and at a basketball game. It was just an ordinary day, but it was a great day that just made me feel over the top. I have no romantic Valentine this year, but I couldn't be more ok with that this year, although the single rose, the few chocolates and the paper heart that says Dear Kristen, Love you, left at my door step did add a cherry to the top of my loving day today. But even without those things from some random person, today has still been one of the best days I have had in a long time.

So in my sign out today I leave you with one thought.....make sure you tell the people that you love, that you love them! They are the ones who will always be there and who evidently mean a lot to you because they are in your life right now. I know Valentines is always advertised as the romantic love holiday, but make it what you want it to be, not what the media or world tells you what it should be. I did it my way this year and was the best one I have had in a lot of years!