Okay, okay.  I know this is a typical cheesy Valentine’s title, but y’all.  I am FEELING the love this weekend.  Let me start with romantic love (since everyone assumes that’s what this is all about), and then move on to the real message behind this babble.  

My husband and I can really get on each other’s nerves.  I feel like such a phony when people tell me how perfect we are for each other.  Don’t get me wrong, WE TOTES ARE, but we have arguments and major pain-in-the-butt moments just like any other couple.  We aren’t just our social media accounts, but who posts about fights with their spouses on Facebook?  Drama queens. While we aren’t perfect, sometimes this dude knows how to strengthen the foundation on which we stand.  This canvas print is of an audio byte that Rick took of our son saying “mama”.  The sweetest words I’ve ever heard, live, and in color.  It seriously made my heart implode.

Okay….enough of the romance.  That’s not what we are here to talk about.  The love I experienced this weekend was so much bigger than I had expected.  This morning, I attempted to make heart shaped pancakes for my family to show them how rockin I was in the kitchen much I loved them.  Let’s take a look at my attempts.  (Thanks, Kym, for the pancake pen)

Attempt one was pretty disappointing.  It went into the pan in an almost heart shape, but came out as a severely injured organ.  We titled this piece “Pancake Shards”.

Intimidated by the failure of attempt one, I moved on to an “L” for “love”.  It was okay I guess, but not the amazing pancake calligraphy I had assumed I’d be able to create.

I would show you attempts 3, 4 and 5, but they all looked identical to attempt 1.  Finally, I got some pancake hearts and my family knew that I must really care about them.  At this point, I’d eaten so many trash pile pancakes, I wasn’t even hungry for hearts.  I ate them anyway, of course.

So this weekend, my BFF’s big brother (RG) married a beautiful lady named Rachel.  At the reception, they played “Love You Forever” by The Beatles.  My dad sang this song to me practically every day of my entire life growing up.  Needless to say, my mom, dad, and I cried like the embarrassingly emotional people we are.  In that moment, the three of us, sitting separate from each other, kept making eye contact and blotting our eyes with lovely, personalized, purple, wedding napkins.  It’s nice that even in my parents’ divorce, we can still all look back at memories with love.

I can’t forget another type of love that’s been with me almost as long as my parents.  I got to spend some solid time with my BFF Sarah this weekend.  She was the love of my life for so long.  She lives in Durham, so we don’t get to hang out very often, but we always seem to pick up right where we left off.

I also got to see Sarah’s mom this weekend, who I haven’t seen in FIVE years.  We went out to eat with our mommies and I felt like a little kid all over again.  Nostalgic love is just the BEST.

To end my Valentine’s Day weekend, I received an incredibly big surprise in the mail from one of my oldest friends:

My friend Katie Lynn sent me this beautiful gift today.  It was totally unexpected and the thoughtfulness of it was so real that I just started sobbing.  It donates money to the Alzheimer’s Association, which KL knows is dear to my heart, but also the purpose of this bracelet really struck me.  The black bead has a bit of earth inside it directly from The Dead Sea, representing the lowest of lows.  The white bead has water from Mount Everest representing the highest of highs. The other beads represent the moments between the highs and the lows.  Katie Lynn and I share a strangely unique bond over our highs and lows.  It started when I reached out to her when my parent’s got divorced.  She helped me through the process, and prepared me for what to expect.  Then, her father died and she experienced a low I was unfamiliar with, and all I could do was love her.  The both of us know how important those in between beads are because we have been those beads to each other.  The in between beads are what help us balance our joy and our sadness.  They’re the people in our lives who celebrate with us and mourn with us.  They’re the songs we sing, the dogs we pet, the friends we keep, and the babies we hold.  They’re our snapchats, our Arby’s beef n’ cheddars, our journals, and our deep conversations.  They’re everything we love and everyone who loves us.  They’re our life-and all we need in it.  They’re all forms of love.

Happy Valentine’s Day.