Welcome to my first post about holidays! Just a reminder that while I’ll be blogging about a few of our more meaningful family holidays, you should check out my instagram account (@alphabetresolutions) if you’d like to follow along with the random holidays I am trying to celebrate just this year. There’s a highlight of instagram stories about those days and a few posts too!

I have had my ups and downs with Valentine’s Day, but I have always loved February 14th, and now I love it more than ever. When I was little I remember my mom absolutely loving Valentine’s Day. She is big into hearts and pink and red and all that jazz and she always told my siblings and I that it was a day about all kinds of love, not just romantic love. I went through periods where I believed her and celebrated in just that way and I went through phases where it felt like I was the only single person in the world and that Valentin’s Day was the worst idea ever. After binging 30 Rock I spent several years referring to it as “Anna Howard Shaw Day” And I have now gone through a decade of Valentine’s Days with my husband and known the joys of being “that couple” who should probably tone it down a bit, and the frustrations of it being just another day in the stress of parenting.

There is one thing that February 14th has been to me more than anything else- Arizona’s birthday. The day Arizona became a state. Please excuse me while I go on a side tangent love declaration to my state: I LOVE YOU ARIZONA! You are weird and frustrating sometimes, and you have enough embarrassing stories for The Good Place to be totally justified in its many references to you, but you are also full of the most stunning desert beauty, some crazy Wild West plot twists, and you are home to so many people I love. Plus, for a lady who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, you are one of the most cost effective places with a ton of sunshine. I don’t know how it took me almost a decade of being away from your desert beauty to finally fall in love with your cacti and mountains, but I include them in my gratitude practice almost every day now. So I need you to know my love for you is not diminishing, but the fact is that I have a new favorite reason for loving February 14

My third daughter was born on February 14th last year, making her my Arizona girl and my forever Valentine. Adding her to our family is my new favorite thing about February 14th. Thanks to COVID, her first year has been VERY different than the year of firsts her siblings had, and her birthday will be no exception. We’d love to thrown her a big party, let her see more of the world, but life being what it is it will be a smaller event physically, but we’d love to still make it a big deal- so we are asking friends and family to perform random act of kindness/send some love, in honor of our youngest, into the world, and then send us a digital picture of a heart with the good deed you did written on it or an actual paper heart in the mail. We’d love for our daughter’s birth on this day of love to be celebrated with all sorts of good deeds and kindness in the days leading up to it. We’re hoping when she looks back on all these hearts in her baby book that she will realize love is what made her first birthday great! Even during these not so great times.