My Funny Valentine

I am all about fruits and vegetables, whole grains and good fats, fibre and protein and iron, I swear.  I love leafy greens in raw, cooked, dehydrated, and smoothie form.  I stir flax and wheat germ and pureed beans into baked goods, and my children actually like it.

But I'll tell you what else they like: completely nutritionally deficient sugar cookies in thematic shapes, slathered with lots and lots of coloured buttercream.

I love it too.  I have cookie cutters in all sorts of fun shapes, and I'm not afraid to use them.  When January wraps up its cold dreariness, I turn my sights to that day of heart-shaped everything, Valentine's Day.

I, not uniquely, I suspect, was once an anti-Valentine's type of person, and not just when I was single, no.  Valentine's Day was cliched and boring and made-up - unlike all those other, "true" holidays like Labour Day or Thanksgiving. 

If I could time travel, I would go and shake my younger self, because Valentine's Day is fun!  Who cares about romance, heart shaped cookies are where it's at!  With this in mind, I mixed up some dough, smiling as I rolled it out and cut out the heart shapes.  "The secret ingredient is love!" I kept saying to my boys, who may or may not have rolled their eyes at me. 

I spread them thickly with homemade buttercream and sent them for snack all week, with fruit and veggies so as not to be a total nutritional failure.  I imagined the boys feeling their mother's love as they ate them; although the truth is that more likely they felt something more along the lines of "Hey, cool!  Heart cookies!"