Valentines Day

In simpler, less socially isolated times, the younger boys and I went to the Children's Museum.

Lincoln got a bike for his birthday. Jeff encouraged him to give it a spin, but he was a little nervous to be a two-wheeler.

Lincoln is happiest on four wheels. In costume.

Keeping in tradition with my Mom's efforts to turn every food into a heart-shape on Valentine's Day, I made a hearty breakfast for the family.

The little guys and I made and decorated sugar cookies. Because what else would you do with a free afternoon on Heart Day?!?

Lincoln lovingly made notes for each member of the family.

We love to walk to pick up the older boys from school. As soon as we get back to our neighborhood, I let Lincoln and Jonah out to run the last block of the walk. They have started lining up and assuming a starting position before "taking off on their super speedy motorcycles" to cruise home.

We only do video games on Fridays and Saturdays, so with Valentine's Day landing on a Friday, Eli fantasized all week about running home from school to play video games with his candy sprawled out around him. Well, he made that dream a quick reality within five minutes of walking in the door.

I kept up with the hearts through dinner. Because I'm fancy like that.

We have been having emotional lessons with the older boys about once a week after the little boys go to bed. I had noticed our whole family was struggling with effective anger management, so I bought a workbook to help us open up a dialogue about our feelings and to learn appropriate ways to cope with our feelings.

It has been an inspired idea and I'm grateful I followed through on the idea. I've really enjoyed spending intentional time with the older boys to talk about feelings and they have been surprisingly receptive to the lessons.

One evening we were talking about ways our body tells us we are feeling angry. Eli said he sometimes hits his head with his hand when he's mad. We said, "Yeah, sometimes people feel like they want to hurt themselves when they're mad. Do you think that's a good thing to do with your anger?"

Eli said no and we discussed what would be a better thing to do when we feel mad. He told us sometimes he likes to calm down by reading books in his clothes bin in his closet. We laughed because we've all seen Eli happily sitting in his clothes bin and I was proud of him for recognizing that is a positive activity that brings him comfort.

The next Saturday, Eli got upset when we told him we would have to do video games a little bit later than usual because of baseball practice. This is an incident that would typically set him off into an anger rage, but this time he *loudly* expressed he was upset, and then quickly regained his composure while plopping himself in his clothes bin with a book.

It's so hard to know what lessons will work and what is effective and it feels like everything we do sometimes is pointless. But these are the moments that keep me going and give me hope that some of our efforts to teach the boys to grow up into responsible adults might just maybe be working.