Every year on February 14th, I post a simple and delightful Facebook status: Happy VD. Makes me laugh every time. Clearly, I’m not wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day, but a happy venereal disease. J/k and just joshin’ (so underused these days).

This post is going to be a little more on the “serious” side in the sense that I have nothing to make fun of or any demeaning stories about myself to share regarding Valentine’s Day. On the contrary, I feel very sentimental about VD. I never had a significant other to share VD with until senior year of high school when I had my first boyfriend (lucky I got that in before the age of 18 or else I’d have many more self deprecating stories than I already do). After that year, I went back to be VD free. But during that time, one of my favorite memories was sharing my VD with my best friend, eating Whoppers and watching TV in the sorority house while our friends were drinking away their VD’s. Cut to junior year of college when I had a boyfriend again (who is TH and now the only one I share my VD with).

But because of the type of cynical and sarcastic person I am, I never cared about Valentine’s Day. I didn’t expect gifts, a planned night out or anything expensive or daunting for TH (at least in my revisionist head I didn’t care). So leave it to him to end up making Valentine’s Day one of my now favorite holidays. After 6 (extremely smooth and always conflict free) years of dating, he proposed to me on February 14th. How cute, gag, right?! That’s your first impression. But you have to remember who he was dealing with – a girl who would make fun of anyone who proposes on Valentine’s Day, thus, making it the one day I would never expect to be proposed to. So give him credit for pulling off the element of surprise and simultaneously turning me into a romantic (or at least bringing it out of me).

And so it is, February 14th, 2014 (2/14/14)…the 10 year anniversary of our engagement.

By the way, this isn’t the point of my post, I just get talking and go on tangents.

No, the point is I’d like to give a shoutout to 1.0’s kindergarten teacher for making this Valentine’s Day celebration at school both easy and fair. The Pinterest and Facebook posts are in full effect this week of the VD boxes and cards you can do yourself. I don’t subscribe to DIY. Our teacher has decided to provide every child in the class with a simple handle bag that they can decorate with stickers, glitter glue, etc. Wonderful. Genius. Simple.

First of all, it’s just not fair to the kids who don’t have Pinterest-worthy parents making their boxes for them. Why create a situation in which someone feels bad because their box/bag looks schlumpy or worse, they don’t even have one because, oh I don’t know, some parents these days have actual responsibilities and commitments that include earning a wage, getting food on the table and helping with homework, leaving maybe not 3 hours of time one night to make a freaking box. I could go into the dumbness (word?) of even celebrating Valentine’s Day in our schools and pressuring kids to give each other love notes, but ugh, then I’d have to get into the issue of uniforms, prayer in schools, etc. because I’m incapable of not going off on a tangent…clearly.

So I’d like to say thank you to our teacher for helping the parents out. We still need to send our kids with a card to give to all the students and that was a bit onerous, but it was much more manageable than trying to do any of this: