“Will you be my Valentine?” I asked.
Her face lit up in a huge grin. “Sure!” she squealed in delight.
Then I handed her a box of Brach’s heart-shaped candies, those traditional Valentine’s Day candies with saccharine phrases stamped on them.
“These are for you,” I told her.
“Thanks, dad!” she exclaimed. Then she ran off to play.
Dad successfully gave his daughter her first Valentine’s Day presents.
A short time later the girl returned with box in hand.
“Can you write my name on the box?” she asked.
She looked at the box with disbelief.
“No, silly!” she explained a moment later. “You don’t write ‘dad’ on the box. You write my last name!”
When mom returned home from work, the girl greeted her in the kitchen with balloon in hand.
“Oh, look at that!” mom exclaimed. “Did your favorite Valentine give you a balloon?”
“No,” the girl replied. “Dad did.”
Ouch.
"Who is your favorite Valentine?" the Boss asked.
"You are!" the girl replied, throwing her arms around her mother in a big hug.
Somehow, this wasn’t working out as I expected.
Later in the evening, after mom took the boys to Karate, the girl and I retired to the basement for some Wii sports before bed.
“Dude, why do you have a hole in your sock?” she asked, wiggling two of her toes through the hole in my sock.
“I don’t know,” I told her. Exactly how do you answer that question? It isn’t like I wanted a hole in my sock.
“Where did you get the balloon?” the Captain continued, waving her red “trophy” in the air. She called it her trophy all night long, although I do not know what she won in order to earn that prize.
“At Dollar General,” I replied.
“At Dollar General?” she repeated. “They had a balloon there for me?”
“Yes, they did,” I answered.
She paused a few seconds.
“Did they have a Slim Jim?”
(Sigh)
We’ll try this again next year.
