I don’t know why, every Valentine’s Day morning, I think it’s a good idea to make heart-shaped pancakes. It seems like such a loving and maternal and “simple pleasures” thing to do, but actually pancakes are a hassle and a mess. As soon as I get started, I remember this.

Rob and William come into the kitchen and they’re completely in my way every time I turn around, and the presence of hot pans and hot syrup is making me jittery with visions of emergency-room burns and permanent scarring, and they keep asking me questions when I’m distracted and trying to keep up with the bubbling pancakes and boiling syrup, and so I start speaking sharply to them and before long they’ve stopped their happy talking, and not long after that they go out into the living room, and there I am in the kitchen by myself, having ruined another potentially pleasant childhood memory. Why would I speak lovingly to them on Valentine’s Day, when the real point of Valentine’s Day is PERFECTLY-MADE PANCAKES?

There are drips of batter everywhere, and everything gets sticky with syrup, and meanwhile the children are asking for more and I’m standing there frustrated and starving with half a bowl of batter still left to pour. The twins are inexplicably crying and refusing to eat their pancakes, and their crying seems so ungrateful when I’m working so hard and getting so frustrated.

By the time all the pancakes are made, the children are done eating and I eat a couple of pancakes standing up at the counter before starting right in on the surprisingly large pile of dishes, feeling like the Valentine’s Day Martyr, spreading her message of what true love is about: sacrifice and resentment, and loving gestures delivered with sharp words and a crabby attitude.

And as I’ve said, I do this every year. It would be more in my style of mothering to buy some pretty heart-shaped plastic bowls and serve breakfast cereal in them, and have heart-shaped paper napkins too, and we would all talk happily about what a fun surprise that was and whether they could use the bowls again later for soup, and I would say YES! and it would be a great treat. So why do I keep doing the pancakes? It doesn’t matter how often I remind myself that we are all different kinds of mothers and we all have different strengths, I keep trying to work with other mothers’ strengths: I try to be the one who whips up a picturesque and entertaining breakfast, when my strength is shopping for fun stuff. Next year, I’m buying the bowls.

Anyway.

Yesterday we talked about Valentine’s Day Past, and today as promised we will talk about Valentine’s Day Present. What are your plans? Anyone going on a hot date? Anyone staying in and getting a pizza? Anyone turning into a Kitchen Bitch over stupid pancakes?

It does us no good to pretend that Valentine’s Day is not tomorrow: we all know that it is, so we might as well talk about it. I’ve heard complaints that Valentine’s Day is a “Hallmark holiday,” but Valentine’s Day got started in the Middle Ages, so that complaint is right out. Sweetest Day and Boss’s Day, though, I’m totally with you.

My best Valentine’s Days have been when I was single. I’d get together with a friend or two, and we’d pretend to be sad and depressed while we watched romantic movies, ordered pizza, and ate out of a large heart-shaped box of chocolates. Fun. Once–and this was the best of all–I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I got a heart-shaped balloon from a secret admirer, and I never did find out who sent it. Secret admirer + movies/pizza/chocolate = Best Valentine’s Day Ever.

The Valentine’s Days with a boyfriend or husband have always been letdowns. There was the high school boyfriend who gave me a red plush teddy bear with “I Love You Beary Much” on the tummy. The college boyfriend who gave me a bracelet from a gumball machine. The husband who said on Valentine’s Day afternoon, “Oh, uh….hey. Do we do Valentine’s Day?”

Nevertheless, I am fond of the holiday. I like heart-shaped boxes and the chocolates inside them, and I like pretty Valentine’s Day cards, and I liked the card exchange when I was in elementary school, and now I like helping Rob and William with their card exchanges. One of my friends sent me a Valentine’s Day card a couple of years ago, and I thought that was a nice thing to do and so now we exchange them each year, and I do the same with my other favorite friend.

Tell me about your Valentine’s Day history. Best? Worst? Tomorrow I plan to ask you about THIS Valentine’s Day and what your plans are, but for today let’s talk about the past.

Beth has posted my question in today’s Diary of a Playgroup Dropout, and if you guys have any advice about handling/managing/cutting/taming baby girl hair, go on over there and chip in. You don’t even have to have a baby girl–you can just have been a baby girl yourself at one time, or have known baby girls, or have heard something about difficult hair in general.

Also, if you know anything about a good child’s conditioner, please speak up. All I can find are ones that smell like gross fruity candy. I’d like one that smelled like regular baby shampoo, or even just like non-gross-fruity-candy.

I first found Beth’s column on ClubMom when Linda at Purple Is A Fruit linked to this column: “Would Somebody Shut Me Up Already?” and I’ve been reading every since. Good stuff.

Perhaps you are in the market for the kind of baby hat that will cause strangers to fall backwards into store shelves, scattering products and clutching their hearts?

You are in luck! Such a hat is on clearance at L. L. Bean: Take me to those ear hats and right quick. As seen on the Swistle Twins! Limited quantities available! Certain colors already sold out in certain sizes! Twins are modeling “Lake” (Edward) and “Pink Lilac” (Elizabeth).

Guess what I bought this weekend? A freezer! The act of blogging about it apparently filled me with fresh resolve. I went into the store, looked at the freezers, chose one, and it’ll be delivered Friday. It is an upright, even though those cost more to run, because I am not temperamentally suited to a chest freezer, and would always be “just this once” taking out the topmost items rather than the ones that were oldest. It’s a self-defrosting one, even though those too cost more to run, because I am at peace with myself the way I am, and I know I would never ever defrost the freezer, and eventually I would have one cubic foot of freezer space surrounded by many cubic feet of frost. I had been fretting about what size to choose, but the cost per year of running the three different sizes was basically the same (a $5/year difference between the smallest and the largest), and the largest was on sale for less than the cost of the medium-sized one, and so I bought the largest one. Yay, me! Before the baby is born I will be able to make all those yummy recipes you guys sent in.

I have a new rule for inclusion in the Rulebook For Parents, and I assume someone is compiling such a volume because it is clearly needed. The new rule is this: No parent may set up an activity for children that requires supervision, and then bail. For example: I may not set up Rob and William with fingerpaints, as if I am some sort of Fingerpaint Fairy bestowing favors, and then say to Paul, “See you later! I’m going to the store!”

Notice how cleverly I avoid implicating Paul as the rule-breaker when I use this example. It almost seems as if I could have broken the rule myself, and was now feeling remorse. But in fact what happened was that Paul set the twins loose in the house with cups of orange juice and crayons, and then took off on a walk with William.

The twins get very little time loose in the house: they spend most of their time in their room–which is also their playroom–and the large play yard in the living room. This is because they are still destructive, mindless animals, and because they get into trouble in two different directions at once. When they are out, they require intense supervision, ideally by two adults so that one can stop Edward from pulling the tape out of a videotape while the other stops Elizabeth from pulling out handfuls of crayons and throwing them under the couch. And do you think the twins are normally allowed to have cups of sticky, sticky orange juice while they are running free? No. No, they are not.

Certainly no one would want to be the one to re-cage the twins after someone else has promised them time to roam freely. You might as well set up an air raid siren–no, two air raid sirens–right inside your house, and let them whoop until your teeth fragment and skitter to the floor. And so I was trapped: the door closed behind Paul, and Elizabeth dropped her cup. Moments later, Edward upended the crayon bin. Moments after that, Elizabeth tripped and hit her mouth and started screaming, and Edward used the ensuing fuss as an opportunity to escape into the kitchen and start emptying cupboards. If I had come up with the twin freedom idea, I would have been cursing myself; as it was, I was cursing Paul. Paul was conveniently not there to receive the curses.

I don’t think I should always have to be the one issuing edicts around here, and yet that is the way it happens. Some of us seem to instinctively understand the rules, and others of us seem to need them spelled out. Writer of the rulebook, please take note.

Apparently you guys were just tapping your fingers impatiently through all the posts on baby names and recipes, dying for me to ask you instead what TV shows to watch.

I’ve watched Six Feet Under on DVD already; I found it almost too upsetting at times, but wonderful. The last episode had me sobbing—not just crying a little but snorting and heaving and choking. I think I watched the last part of it three times, and then had welling tears every time I thought of it for the next few days. And, um, also right this minute, writing about it.

On another topic, I told some people in my real life about my blog. It was a total secret before, and now it’s a mixed secret: I told Paul and my parents that the blog exists, but that they may not read it. This may have been a mistake. But I am not good with secrets, and I was starting to slip and have to cover it up, and also I wanted to be able to tell Paul and my parents when something awesome happened (“CATHERINE NEWMAN commented on my blog!!” “SUNDRY reads my blog!!”).

As you might expect, there have been mixed reactions to my sudden revelation. Paul was a little crabby, especially when I made him actually literally promise not to look for the blog or read it—but also made him listen to stories of blog happiness. My mom, who is the kind of mom who would walk right past an open diary, was just “Oh! How nice!” My dad is more, “If it’s a public blog, it should be public”–that is, he should get to read the whole thing, because everybody on the internet gets to. My argument is that it isn’t really public. Sure, it’s on the internet, but it’s anonymous. If it weren’t anonymous, I wouldn’t be writing as frankly as I write. And to my parents, I’m not anonymous. Therefore, they can’t read it. We’ve worked out an arrangement: I’ll send him links to the entries he may read, as long as he promises not to go poking around in the rest of the site. I can’t write if I’m thinking, “Oh, my dad’s going to be reading this–better leave out the part about pelvic rest.”

Semi-Desperate Housewife had a post awhile back on this general topic–basically, who knows about your blog, and how does it affect your writing, and do you leave things out because of the people you know are reading, and do you now regret telling people about the blog?

I never manage to remember what’s on TV or when, and so what I like to do is rent DVDs of TV shows that are no longer on the air. It’s an instant-gratification way to snork down entire series: no waiting a week for the next episode, no waiting all summer for the next season.

But here is the problem: it does me no good to rent DVDs of TV shows that are still currently producing episodes. I accidentally got started on Gilmore Girls and now I’ve seen through season 6 but I have to wait ages before season 7 will be on DVD.

What I need are recommendations for good television series that are no longer being made, so that I can watch the entire series now, with no waiting.

I had an OB appointment today (I’m at 23 weeks), and he went over with me the results of the ultrasound I had in mid-January. Apparently the ultrasound shows I may have placenta previa.

I’ve been doing a little frantic online research, and so far it’s setting my fears to rest. For one thing, I was thinking that placenta previa could lead to placental abruption (where the placenta pulls away from the uterine wall, depriving the baby of things it needs), but I was mistaken in that. Also, it appears that it’s fairly common to hear after a mid-pregnancy ultrasound that you have placenta previa, but then to find later that the problem is no longer there. I have an ultrasound in 4 weeks to check to see if “migration” has occurred. The OB said the placenta doesn’t literally migrate (here he made a wing-flapping gesture) but that as the uterus expands it can turn out that the placenta was never over the cervix to begin with and only appeared to be.

If it hasn’t migrated, the ultrasound will determine how far over the cervix the placenta is. I’ll have to be alert for any bleeding (as if I’d be blase about that otherwise), and there’s an increased risk of early hospitalization and premature birth. Women with placenta previa have to have c-sections, but I have c-sections anyway so that’s no big deal.

The most alarming thing to Paul, of course, is that if I do have placenta previa, I’ll be put on, um, “pelvic rest.”