When I sit down to analyze it, and you know that I do, I find that there are a few different ways to be superior on Valentine’s Day:

1) Effort superiority “Oh, these? It was simple. I raised the goat from birth and then collected the cashmere this past spring.  After I combed the fleece out, I dyed it using berries I picked and crushed myself.  Then I spun it into yarn over the course of a few evenings while my husband read selections of Proust aloud.  I measured all of the children and designed custom pieces for each with consideration to minimizing body flaws as well as accommodating each individual’s resting basal temperature.  Then I just whipped them up.  And–TA-DA!–Valentine’s sweaters for each member of the class! So easy.”

2) Creative superiority “Well, I was just looking at a pile of discarded dryer lint and I thought surely there must be something to do with it. They do make darling, gossamer-like wrappers for these homemade cayenne cherry cordials, don’t they?”

3) Wholesomeness superiority “I didn’t want to give the kids sugar, obviously, so I thought a toy was the way to go. And why buy a plastic toy from China when these perfectly darling wooden cars from sustainably-harvested wood are made by the local toymaker just down the street? He donates all his profits to charity, too.”

4) Above-it-all superiority “I don’t like getting caught up in this hoopla for a made-up holiday, so I just bought some Sponge Bob Valentines from Walgreens. Who has time to worry about this stuff, right?”

I usually wrestle with one or more of these demons each year and I think I was trying to top it all this year with some sort of plan for homemade cards (#1) made with a homemade stamp (#2) and accompanying homemade, heart-shaped sugar cookies (#3).  And, of course, each of these carefully considered items would be just imperfect enough to demonstrate that they were made by the children, not the mother, and thus proving none of this was planned! It just happened! Like magic! Tee hee! (#4)

Yeah, well, you know what happened like magic? A raging, killer stomach virus happened. It started with Sam, then hit Michael, then Annabel, then me, all in such quick succession that we all took a family sick day with everyone in some varying stage of it by Monday. And that is about when I realized that Valentine’s Day was arriving in just a few hours.

In my defense, I at least have been around this block enough times to know that you never attempt to do all of the Valentines in one fell swoop.  Despite my liberal use of a cattle prod to inspire focus, my children do not have the attention span to complete that many cards in one sitting. So we at least had something produced by Monday–paint-splattered paper for Sam and stamped construction paper for Annabel.

Here, Sam, stamp that. Here, Annabel, throw some glitter on those. Here, Cherie, attempt to do wholesome post-dinner baking project with your children in-between severe drops in blood pressure. Here, Michael, take over the entire project when your wife collapses on the kitchen floor because all she’s been able to consume in the last 24 hours is one quarter of a piece of toast.

Annabel’s are the pink, Sam’s are the white, the despair is fully my own. Cookies not included, but we burnt some of them and sent them anyway, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about how little I cared about Valentine’s Day by  9 o’clock on Monday night. Which is when I finished bagging cookies and taping them to the Valentine’s, completely discarded the original plan of tying them into cute little packages with yarn.

I don’t think it was my year.

In case you were wondering, the hot-chocolate-ice-cream-cone lady totally won again.

That’s a Blow Pop flower made from handcut papers with a pipe cleaner stem.

I think I’m just going to outsource Valentine’s Day to her next year.

It seems like less of a milestone than it probably should, mostly because he’s been acting two for a few weeks now.  I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily, it’s just what it is.  When I said that same thing in pretty much those same words to one of his teachers at daycare yesterday morning she said, “OH, WE’VE NOTICED.” And then I think she felt bad, but she shouldn’t. I wasn’t offended. Two is what two is and Sam is who he is and here we are and that’s that.

Sam’s always had a bit of roughneck and temper in him, so really it’s not that the headbutting, punching, and toy throwing is new.  When he was just a wee little guy, I remember looking down at him in hormone-fueled bliss and saying, “Hi, sweet boy.” He reached up his tiny hand to my cheek in adoration and grabbed a fistful of flesh that he tried to rip off my person.  And then I said the thing I have said at least 7,521 times since then, “Wow, Sam, your love is rough.”

His love is rough.  He likes to run across the room and head-butt his adored (and adoring) dog, then he collapses on the floor, howls in pain for a minute, gets up and does it again.  His favorite game with Michael is to sit on his stomach and bounce up and down with all his might until Michael can’t breathe anymore.  When I get home from work he runs up to give me a great big hug, which he immediately follows with a punch to the face.

We try to curb his most violent instincts, obviously, but for the most part we are all working on developing our ninja deflection reflexes and distraction techniques until he’s able to learn a modicum of self-control. I’ve given up trying to referee sibling skirmishes and instead find myself teaching Annabel to just walk away.

“Sam’s biting me!” “Walk away.”

“Sam’s hitting my baby!” “Walk away!”

“Sam pulled my hair!”  “WALK AWAAAY!”

We put up with him because there is, of course, the softer side of Sam.  There’s book-lover Sam, who will happily spend 30 minutes or more digging his way through book after book until he’s built up a fort of literature around himself.  There’s cuddlebug Sam who still likes to spend quite a bit of time ensconced on my lap or giving me hugs.  And there’s “I’m sorry” Sam who, when released from time out, goes over to his sister and lays his head upon her shoulder in apology.

And there’s this Sam, who doesn’t really have a special name, other than all-day-every-day-Sam Sam:

He hit me in the head with those balloons less than a second after this shot.

And then he kissed me.

Welcome to two, buddy.  I’m glad it caught up with you.

The three of us stood on the corner together, waiting for the light to change.  When it did, we crossed with caution.  That corner has a big problem with people turning right without looking for pedestrians. Sure enough, we had to skid out of the way of a car and the mother and I shared a polite, unifying complaint about it.  Then we went our separate ways.  I turned right across the bridge to go buy some specialty chocolates and they turned left towards the “Residents Only” door of the homeless shelter.

That’ll put a nice spin on your Christmas shopping.

A few weeks later, I was driving back into town after an evening meeting.  As I came down towards the light, that same light, I saw a large group of people walking towards me.  I recognized the kid immediately, his bulky but jaunty walk was pretty identifiable.  And there was his mother, right next to him again, walking with her arms wrapped around herself.  She was talking with a big man a few feet away.  As the group turned towards the shelter, the man reached out his hand.  He gently pushed the boy in the arm jokingly, then grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him in for a rough hug.  The boy wrapped his arm around his dad, and they walked in the shelter together.

That same kid. Twice in a month. That’s worth noticing, right?

I think it’s really easy to assume that people end up in shelters because of something they did.  Maybe they have an addiction problem, maybe they let debt spiral out of control, maybe they stopped taking their medications, maybe they made bad decision upon bad decision until they managed to lose everything.

I assume those things too.

But I’m hard-pressed to think about what a 12-year-old boy could do that would justify his presence in a homeless shelter.  I find it even harder to believe that any possible mistakes or bad decisions that his parents made were bad enough that they should be relegated to seeing their son through adolescence as transients.  If there were any mistakes or bad decisions.  These days, it seems, bad luck can be quite enough do people in.

Today I put my fifty bucks in an envelope with a note asking that it be forwarded to that family and I mailed it to the shelter.  I’m not kidding myself.  It’s not going to fix even one of their problems. But I hope they know I am cheering for them.  I hope it helps.

I hope I don’t see him again.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read here.

October 2003 Michael and I get married.

2003-2005 We lead a blissful, simple life in a centrally-located, completely affordable rental house with ample amenities and generally pleasant landlords who like us. Naturally, we decide this situation must change.

Fall 2005 We look for houses in our area. Everything is either 1) twice as much as we can possibly get a mortgage approved for or 2) thirteen seconds and one strong wind from collapsing into the basement.  We decide building a house is the most brilliant idea ever and plus it will be so much fun. We can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t build a house!

January 2006 We buy a 3.5 acre parcel on a wooded hill with a lot of granite ledge.  We take the first picture of our house.

We are young and stupid and it still hasn’t occurred to us that this is a really bad idea.  Even though it was about ten degrees that day.

March 2006 Foundation is poured.

Yes, that’s me. I have no idea what I was doing.

April 2006 Exteriors walls are up.

That’s our friend Mark. I have no idea what he was doing, either. Look, I kept a blog. I didn’t keep notes.

April-September 2006 We work unbelievably hard, hemorrhage money in a spectacular fashion, and fight almost daily.

September 2006 We move in. Most of the house looks like this:

We eat, sleep, hang out, and generally live in our bedroom, which looks like this:

Basically, we are camping in our own house.  These are grim days, as you can tell from the dog’s expression. Grim days, indeed.

September 2006-February 2007 We steadily chip away at making rooms habitable. Gradually, we have a fully functioning kitchen, a bathroom with an actual sink, and a guest room that serves as our living room.  We are still living almost entirely on the second floor.

February 2007 Uh-oh. Cherie’s pregnant. The kid’s probably going to want a living room, eh?  And it’s probably not supposed to have a table saw in it, right?

February-November 2007 Hurry, hurry! Get the downstairs finished! Hang drywall, install floors, make a nursery!  Other women buy fluffy crib bedding when their nesting instinct hits. I shingled.

November 2007 Annabel is born.

November 2007-October 2008 Nothing happens. I mean, we make a few kitchen drawers, we put up a few more shingles, we tinker here and there, but for the most part, there is no significant progress.  It turns out that having a baby makes building a house nearly impossible. We probably should have thought this whole thing through a little better.

November 2008 We install the woodstove.

That may not seem significant, but that’s only because you aren’t me. Trust me. It was significant.

November 2008-May 2009 Nothing happens.

May 2009 Uh-oh. Cherie’s pregnant again. Hurry! Hurry! Finish the larger spare bedroom and move Annabel in! Except not really, because who can summon that kind of energy with a two-year old around?

May 2009-January 2010 Nothing happens, but we talk a lot about doing something.

February 2010 Sam is born.

Not coincidentally, Annabel gets a new bedroom.  I don’t have a picture of that for some reason.

February 2010-October 2011 Nothing happens.  Well, you know, shingling. That happens in fits and starts like always.

October 2011 The shingling is done!

October 2011-January 2012 Nothing happens.

So! There we are.  I plan on doing a little tour of the house soon for those interested in such a thing.  Also, if you would like to see the vision for the house, how the house appears in our heads and not in reality, I’ve added a tab at the top for it.

There’s the full story to date. Now you know. And that twitch in my left eye is fully explained.

But, yes, a picnic lunch it was.  That’s how warm it has been.

As a result, I haven’t been able to wear the pants very much this year, just twice so far, actually.  They are so thick and heavy that I can only save them for the coldest days.  It’s getting colder again, so I have hopes to pull them out again. But I wear them when I can because they are warm, comfortable and my dad’s.

That’s weird, isn’t it?  For a 36-year-old woman to wear a pair of her dead father’s old pants?

I suppose it is.

Yes, I suppose it is.

*********************************

My dad (“Ralph,” he’d tell people. “My name is Ralph. You know, like everyone’s dog on television? Yeah, Ralph.”) joined the Navy when he was 17 years old.  A November baby, he was always one of the youngest in his class and he graduated from high school five months shy of his eighteenth birthday.  I’m not sure how being younger affected his school days, but it worked in his favor in the Navy.  As a result of his below-18 enlistment, he only had to serve three years instead of the usual four.  He was happy about that in later years.  He thought that was a good deal.  I don’t think he loved being in the Navy.

Why the Navy, anyway? He was from the western slope of Colorado. He loved fishing, camping, and walks in the woods.  He liked horses and wide open spaces.  My whole life I don’t think I saw him in a boat bigger than a canoe.  He liked to be alone.  Why in the world would he be drawn to the Navy, right after the close of the Korean War?  Why would such a man commit to cloistering himself on a ship, in close quarters, with hundreds of other men?

I don’t know why.  Like most things having to do with his Navy time, like most things having to do with his life, my dad didn’t have much to say about it.  It just was.  It was a thing he did and by the time I came along he was doing something else and he didn’t really see the need to tell me much about it.  Why didn’t I stop bothering him and go weed the tomatoes?

*****************

A while ago my sister went to my grandmother’s house and brought back a stack of letters my dad had written during his time in the Navy. She spent hours transcribing his illegible lefty handwriting.  They are sweet, straightforward letters, practical to a fault.  Blankets are cheap here, can I buy you some?  I have to go see the dentist; they say I’ll need that tooth pulled.  Do you have some money to spare? I hate to borrow it but I’m in a bind.  I’m bored; didn’t make it to the show.  Tell the folks I’ll try to write soon.

He ended up as a mechanic on an aircraft carrier.  That’s not a surprise.  He was handy.  He could fix anything.  “I scored the next to highest score in mech,” he wrote from boot camp. “I hope I can get in a school for mech.” He did.  By 1955 he was in charge of a plane.  He didn’t want to be; too much responsibility.

He went to Japan.  The boy from Colorado was in Japan and all he had to say about it was that the way they took their shoes off sure did help keep their houses clean.  He went to Hong Kong, too. It was crowded. What else, Ralph? What else about Japan?  What else about Hong Kong? Isn’t any of it interesting to you, Ralph?

For god’s sake, man. Why the Navy?

We’ll never know.

**************************

I have more than this single pair of zip-front pants, of course.  I have his full navy uniform: the button-up pants, two wool sailor shirts, the seabag.  No coat, though, I think my sister has that. She absconded with it in high school, when a vintage Navy peacoat was just the thing to go with your combat boots.  I was terribly jealous that she got to it first.  The rest of the uniform was mostly forgotten about, until one day when we all dug it out and I put it on as a joke.  It all fit me perfectly, this uniform intended for a 17-year-old boy.  It still does, mostly.  The button pants and shirts are tucked away in the seabag in the attic.  The regular pants hang in my closet.

They are, even after 50 plus years, the warmest pants I’ve ever seen.  The wool is dense and a bit stiff.  In the days before fleece and Gore-Tex, wool was all they had to withstand storms at sea.  This stuff can withstand.  Once, for kicks, I put them on and went for a walk when it was -20 degrees.  I was warm.  I was plenty warm.

His name and number are stenciled on the inside in white.  He scrawled his initials on the tag in the back, too.  At one point he repaired part of the fly by stapling it.  The staples are still there.  They make me laugh, thinking about teenage Ralph stapling his pants back together.

I love those pants.

**************************

I only ever got one semi-full story from my dad about the Navy. He told me once, apropos of nothing that I can remember, about how much he loved being on the aircraft carrier.  In particular, he liked going to the back of the ship.  He would hang out at the stern and watch the wake from the engines stretching off into the distance.  Back there, he was surrounded by nothing.

Once in a while a plane would take off.  He would watch it race down the length of the ship and launch, dropping suddenly down below view as it left the ship, and then climbing up, up, up into the sky.  “That was really neat,” he told teenaged me about teenaged him.  “I really liked watching that.”

I love that image of young Colorado-raised Ralph, sitting on a random crate in his stapled pants, smoking cigarettes and watching planes take off from a ship.  I love that image because even packed in tight with hundreds of other men off the shore of Japan, he found a way to be alone.  I love that image because it sounds like something I would have done.

Some people have family heirlooms, ancestral estates, and elaborate family histories.  They have gravy boats with pedigrees and stories about Great-Aunt Victoria’s scandalous affair with the count.

I have a pair of stapled-together Navy pants.

I’m okay with that.

As I said, they are very warm.

Me: “I’m very glad that you are having a show, but I have to get dressed for work so I need the light on.”

Annabel: “I’m going to have Sam come in here and shoot you.”

Me: “What?!?!?!”

Annabel, heading down the hall: “Sam, I need you to come down here and shoot Mom with your turtle.”

******************

Basically, I have lost all control of the situation. That’s the point of the story.

No, he didn’t shoot me. But he did have a turtle.

Annabel looks like Michael and Sam looks like me.

Which means 52% of you are brilliant because that’s exactly what I believe.

Sam looks like Michael, Annabel looks like me received 19%.

And the debate that started the whole issue remains unresolved, because 13% think both kids look like Michael and 13% think both kids look like me.  Still tied, that one.

And, of course, we had two complaints (and one protest vote) because I didn’t give the option “They both look like a blend of the two parents.”  Which is fair.  I suppose.

Anyone lose any money on the deal?

I think, if nothing else, we’ve learned that we’ll never have one of those unfortunate incidences you hear about occasionally, including in yesterday’s comments, where the parent with the weaker genetic influence gets mistaken for the nanny.

Or, in the profound, pithy words of my sister: “You blue-eyed blondes all look the same to me.”

Fair enough.

“Hey, the kids look just like Michael!” said one person.

“Are you crazy? The kids look just like Cherie!” said another.

We get this all the time.  The kids are my clones, it seems.  Unless they are Michael’s.  They couldn’t look any more like him, except when they look like me.  Opinions vary on this and, boy, do people feel strongly about it.  What to do in such a conundrum?  How can we rest until we know exactly whose genes are dominant?

Obviously, we can’t.  So here we are.  Internet, it’s… decision 2012.

[Does anyone have any dramatic election night music I can borrow? Oh, never mind. Just pretend you hear it right now.]

[Also, there's a fancy, swooping graphic. Pretend you see that, too.]

This is Cherie:

I need about a 30 day stay at a spa with every treatment they can muster.

This is Michael:

He needs a wife with less invasive hobbies.

[Now, just a brief aside here, in the interest of fairness I must admit that more than one person has commented about how Michael and I, er, kind of, um, look-alike. It is icky to admit, but those people do have a point.  It's not like we are two radically different-looking people here.  So that adds to the complexity of the problem.  Just wanted you to know that we are, sadly, aware. On with the show!]

[Oh, and the twin poses were not planned. It just happened.]

This is Annabel:

“Are you done taking my picture? Can I start talking again?”

This is Sam:

“Heeeeyyyy, guys! Sorry I’m blurry! I wouldn’t stop moving long enough to take a decent picture in these low-light conditions!”

There you are. Fresh new headshots to help you with this tough call.

But wait! There’s more!

It’s hard to compare adults to children, don’t you think?  So to help make things  a little easier:

This is Cherie, at age 2 1/2:

I know, right? I want to pinch my little cheeks, too.

This is Michael, at [we think] age 4ish:

Feel free to correct us on that age, Bubba. None of these pictures were dated, so this was our best guess.

And that’s it. Scroll up, scroll down, make your comparisons and then…

VOTE:

“Why?”

“Because I want to take a picture of your hair.”

“My haaaair?”

“Yes, your new haircut. Why are you making that face at me? Come here and let me see your hair.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But you asked to see my hair!”

“Not the back of your hair. Who cares about the back of your hair? No, really now. Cooperate.”

“Seriously? Are you serious right now? Just stop being a goofball for two seconds, look at me, give me a normal smile, and let me take a picture.”

“THANK YOU.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Yes, Sam. What do you need?”

“Ikshu.”

“Oh, sure, baby, I’ll take a picture of your new haircut, too.”

“CEEEEESSSE”

“Well, that’s just about perfect if you plan to try out for a Junior Newscaster position. Do you plan to be a newscaster, Sam?”

“No! MAMA!

“You know, you two are so lucky that you always redeem yourself in the end.  Really, really lucky.”

[Personal aside to Annika: Sam loves that shirt. No, really, he LOVES that shirt. Thank you!]

But there are some positives.

Like when I say, “Hey, don’t you think it would be nice if we had another cabinet here? Maybe something with a plate rack?”

Then he says, “Yeah, that could work.” Out comes the measuring tape and the scrap paper and then, two days later, this appears:

Yeah, that part’s pretty awesome.

I still hate the drills bits thing, though.