Day of Hearts

February, the plethora of hearts month.  There is no getting away from my thoughts of Hope when the world is plastered with hearts.  Not to mention the fact that, she is moving like crazy and is often placing her knee under my ribs, to remind me that she's there.  Valentines day has never been a very exciting thing to me, Shawn and I don't often do anything special.  I did have a Valentines day when I was 14 that involved the boy I liked, asking me to be his girlfriend, I think it ended before the month changed!

Today we celebrated by eating at Harvey's with Sadie and choosing paint colours at Home Depot.  I don't think I saw another woman in Home Depot that wasn't an employee!  I did force Shawn to watch Foot Loose with me in the evening, he was pretty excited about that.  I had been crying beforehand, this tends to make him do things he wouldn't normally agree to.  For some reason I felt overwhelmed today and felt my due date approaching at rapid speed.

My friends would agree that I like to plan, maybe even a little OCD in the planning department.  You would think that moving to another city for a couple of months and doing a million house projects would be my dream come true.  Instead I spend most of my time thinking about all I need to do and finding it impossible to get up and do it.

I've been reading a lot lately and am continually challenged by the things I read.  Most recently, an author was discussing the fact that many of us believe that good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people.  I have never asked God 'why Hope?'  I realize that I don't believe that Shawn or I or anyone else did something to cause her heart to be deformed.  I believe today and have all along, that God has given Hope the perfect heart.  One that allows Him to shine through her story and to touch the lives of so many others.  Maybe I will turn my future Valentines days into the days that Shawn and I shower our girls with special love and thank God for their beating hearts.  That every heart we see in stores would give us an overwhelming sense of how truly blessed we are.

When I was a teenager, in those years where you are most impressionable as a girl and longing to be loved, I would wake up on Valentines day and find 6 roses in my room.  The other 6 would be in my sisters room, my dad put them there to remind us girls that he loved us and until the perfect man arrived, that would be enough.  I'm sure my mom was a helpful voice in this act and I desire to play the same role.  I want my girls to grow up knowing that God loves them, but that Shawn loves them dearly as well.  That until a man can love them like their dad does, they need to protect their hearts and wait.

So my question this February 14th is not, why Hope?  My question is not, why not all of us?  We have not done anything to deserve all the blessings we have in life and for all we know, we'll lose them tomorrow.  Maybe your Valentines day was amazing, maybe it was disappointing and lonely.   Either way, if your heart beats as you read this, you have reason to celebrate and be thankful this year too.

I can only hope that this entire journey will finally take some of the commercialism out of all the holidays and that I'll finally find something valuable in all of them, religious or not, and make them worth while to celebrate.  So tonight I will put my stressed out tears to rest for the day and go to sleep with the realization of how blessed I am to have Shawn and Sadie, both with beating hearts as they sleep and then I'll pray that Hope's aorta will grow...it is heart day after all!