Valentine's Day with kids = ZERO ROMANCE

Valentine's Day becomes a totally different animal when you have kids, doesn't it? If I'm completely honest, I've forgotten what the last few were like, but I do remember the first one.

My husband (then boyfriend) was incredibly excited (I don't know) and woke me up at crazy o'clock in the morning to try and convince me to open my card and present. I - perhaps somewhat ungratefully - said no and told him to wake me up at a more sociable hour. I can't remember what time he woke me up again in the end, but there was a cup of tea and a card and a present and it was all very cute. There's a good chance there was sex at some point too, although I honestly can't remember. But I remember it being a nice day.

This year I was woken by an exuberant three year-old at 8am (it's really not fair that anyone gets to be that full of life and energy before 10am), who then proceeded to steal my phone and shout at me about Fruit Ninja while I was trying to take a shower. Then there were about ten minutes of alternately shouting at and throwing stuff in the direction of my husband (at one point I sprayed his bare foot with dry shampoo in utter frustration that he wouldn't just get the fuck out of bed) before he stumbled out of the room and went to get F, who was rampaging around his cot in a sleeping bag like a giant, hungry maggot.

I wanted to take the kids to the beach because the sun was kind of shining on and off and I'm working all week next week, so outdoor family time felt like a good idea. It stopped feeling like a good idea sometime between not being able to find my wellies and F emptying the entire fucking shoe cupboard all over the hallway. By the time we fell out of the house and into the car, I was pretty much done with the whole thing, but we got to the beach, parked and got out of the car and it was fucking freezing. Not only that, I'd neglected to put hats or gloves on either of the kids, my husband was wearing the thinnest jacket in the world and I'd left my earmuffs at home. Total mum fail.

We gallantly battled our way through the sub-zero wind chill and all piled onto the beach. Obviously it was far too cold for digging in the sand or any of the stuff that you normally do at the beach, so O and I ran off in the general direction of the sea and he dragged me into the surf. Which was fine for him because he was wearing a puddle suit and wellies, but my TU Converse knock-offs were quickly waterlogged and my jeans weren't faring much better. Still, we ran in and out of the sea for a while, then we headed back to my husband and F, liberated F from the pushchair and watched him plop straight down on the sand and shovel a handful into his mouth. After another half hour of general mucking about on the sand, we headed back to the car (it really was fucking cold - it SNOWED later) and O had a tantrum about the fact that I pressed the button at the pedestrian crossing. F fell asleep on the way home.

When we got home, everybody had lunch and grandma came to visit. My husband disappeared outside to clear a bunch of crap out of the garage in the snow and I flicked through a copy of Glamour. O ran maniacally around the house making a cacophony of random noises - after several failed attempts at playing board games - while F napped, then, after the kids had had their tea things got really romantic.

I went upstairs to clean the en suite shower room. It took me over an hour because, to be brutally honest, I haven't done it properly for a really long time. By the time I came back downstairs, it was bath time and O was already tearing about in his Batman pyjamas (complete with cape). F was doing anything but co-operate with the process of getting undressed and into the bath. Once in the bath he played happily for a few minutes before turning on the cold tap and scaring the shit out of himself. Story time was noisy and I don't think anybody was really listening. O cried when he went to bed. He does this almost every night at the moment the door closes and nobody knows why. F threw his bear at me three times.

Now my husband is cooking bruschetta and I'm sort of watching The Big Bang Theory in my unicorn joggers and a jumper I probably really need to put through the wash, which goes to show how much effort I can be bothered to go to after a whole day of constant questions and crying.

So, it hasn't really been a particularly romantic day, and it won't end with champagne and strawberries or sizzling sex. But I'm okay with this. If Valentine's Day is about being with and appreciating the people you love (and, for the sake of argument, we can pretend that it's not really about extravagant gifts and nookie), then I've had a pretty good day. And I don't actually like champagne anyway. 

Dear Husband

Dear Husband,

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost six and a half years since we met. Sometimes I think about that and I’m not quite sure where the time has gone. I look back at the photographs of us from our first Christmas together and I can hardly believe that the people in those pictures are us. We look so young. We were so young. But I remember those days like they were yesterday, even though it is hard to place the people we are now in the life we had back then.

I remember how we were always walking, endlessly circling the streets around our town, deconstructing our lives and our feelings and the simple facts of our days. I think most of what we learned about each other in those early months was learned upon those walks. We liked to drive over to York and walk around there too, then we would stop by the cinema on the way home and watch a movie together.

I remember the night you cooked vegetable lasagne for me in my kitchen, how we lay on the kitchen floor together and I knew I loved you. I knew it in such a way that it wasn’t a feeling, but a fact. Irrevocable. Unchangeable. Solid and dependable. It’s funny how I didn’t know that you were what I was looking for before that night, how I’d thought that we would have something short and fun, but never imagined us in the place we find ourselves now. That night it felt like something I should have known all along.

I remember how sometimes, on our days off together, we would just lie in bed all day, then in the evening we would get up and go wander around the aisles in the supermarket trying to find something we both wanted for dinner. More often than not, we ended up getting take-out instead.

I remember the first home we bought, the endless search through flats and houses and how nothing ever felt quite right until we stood in a ripped out kitchen together and something finally fell into place. Our situation there wasn’t always great, but we had each other and that somehow made everything okay. We told ourselves over and over that it was only temporary, just a footing on the ladder that would lead us to the home we would stay in forever.

I remember handing you a tiny ginger kitten and watching a part of you that I’d never seen before come out. You were like a child on Christmas morning. You’d always told me that you hated cats, but that was the first time you’d ever really been so close to one and I watched you fall in love with him in seconds. Within a month of bringing that kitten and his brother home, you were making friends with every cat on the street and I knew that you were IT.

I remember the night you asked me to marry you, how I knew it was coming because you couldn’t sit still and your sentences were left half-finished. You were skittish and unpredictable, like a firework in an overturned milk bottle. Then I remember the crippling nerves of our wedding day and the giddy excitement of becoming your wife. I remember how everybody else disappeared as I promised my future to you. There were only 40 people in the room with us, but there could have been 4000 and I wouldn’t have cared right then. You anchored me to that moment with nothing but your hand holding mine.

I remember the moment the world turned upside down, and now I look back I can really see how scared we both were behind the excitement and the exhilaration of knowing that we were going to be parents. But you were right there when I needed you, and you made me anything I asked for on the rare occasions that I actually felt up to eating in the first few months. I remember one night all I wanted was a baked potato with butter, so you made one for me and you pulled such a sad face when I came back from the bathroom ten seconds after finishing it looking miserable and shaking my head.

I remember our second search for a home and the many disappointments we had to face along the way. I particularly remember that one house, the house we both loved, the house we could see ourselves living in before we even stepped through the door. There was so much space, so many rooms that went on forever, such a place to grow a family. I know we both felt like we couldn’t possibly belong somewhere like that. We ignored so many things about that house because it was The Dream. The hole in the top floor bedroom ceiling – a sure sign that something was amiss with the roof -; the weird bath; the fact that we would need to buy a new oven with next to no money; how close it was to the road; the lack of parking... But when it came down to it, we knew that enough about it wasn’t right that even when the vendors came back to us after rejecting our offers twice, we somehow knew we’d done the right thing in walking away. But I still think about that house sometimes when I feel like we’re all falling over each other here, and I know that you do too.

I remember us painting this house together, talking for hours about what our lives would be like here, trying to imagine what our baby boy would look like and gazing out over the overgrown jungle of a back garden while we pictured summer days playing football and splashing in a paddling pool with him. And I know that I would have been so much more scared during my first labour if you hadn’t been there. I remember telling you at one point that I didn’t want you to be around for the birth because I couldn’t bear the idea of you seeing me like that, but I know that I only got through it because you were there and when I sobbed that I couldn’t do it anymore, you held my hand and you told me that I could. You were so calm and you made me believe that I was strong and brave and could do anything.

I feel like so much of who we were has gotten lost over the last three and a half years. Or maybe not so much lost as buried, because now our world is so much bigger than just the two of us. But sometimes I forget that you still need me. You still need me to be on your side, to have your back and be the person that I always was for you. So I want you to know that I remember us. I remember the little things and the big things and the million tiny moments that have led us here, and I am grateful for you. I’m grateful that you know me well enough to understand that I’m a bit fucked up sometimes and that it’s not your fault. I can’t imagine feeling so right with anyone but you; you are everything I never knew I always wanted, and I don’t even care how cliché that sounds. I want you to know that I wouldn’t be who I am today without you and that I love you.

I just love you.