Our family celebrated Valentine's Day on Saturday -- mostly because I knew my husband had spent a lot of money on something and I'm an impatient little weirdo. Goirls, the man gave me $300 pearl earrings! I gave him much coveted rechargable CB's. He charged them, played silly cb games in the livingroom, and was obviously thrilled to death. I gave the kids each little remembrances and chocolate-filled hearts. It took me a while to get past being stunned over receiving expensive jewelry.

I've never had anything given to me like those earrings. I told Mike that they made me feel like a princess and that I haven't felt like that since I had my prom. My mom made me a beautiful dress, my hair was done up beautifully, and I was wearing a single pearl necklace that my mother had passed down to me. Saturday night, I felt like that again and at 41 years of age, that was a pretty wow thing.

Happy Valentine's Day!

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Yesterday, we had a nice breakfast and I guzzled coffee like a fiend. The guys did dishes, and then Mike and I sat in the kitchen playing Dungeons and Dragons in our chonies and jammies with Russell. Genny decided finally to come out and sit at a corner of the table and draw pictures with us, but I can safely say, I did little to clean the house, except to rotate laundry.

It was kind of interesting to see how Russell lacked strategy and perceived strategy. His character was all of three feet high and his idea was "rock 'em, sock 'em!" despite the fact that two of our party were not fighters -- his character included. I was very carefully trying to show him strategy -- my character was also not one of the fighters and I did little fighting, but I did do a great deal of reducing the strength of stuff we were fighting, blinding stuff we were fighting, talking to stuff we were fighting, etc., and surrounding and ambushing stuff we were fighting, in order to play, and he was furious that I wasn't trying to kick everything's butt.

I'm such a woman. And he's not. Mothers teach your babies!