Well, I must admit I’m a little jealous of the romantic Valentine stories and the fun Valentine projects. Ours was set for failure beginning with Valentine’s Eve. In South West Michigan it was snowing on the evening before Valentine’s Day.

I returned home from getting my taxes done around 4 pm. I wouldn’t say it was snowing heavily, but it was steady and had been all day, the roads were beginning to get covered. When I left at 6 pm to take one of the teenagers to hockey practice, the thought “I wonder if we’ll make it back home” flickered in my mind. Not to mention, “Why didn’t this coach cancel practice?” We made it back home, barely. We nearly got stuck in the road in front of our house where the snow was at least six inches deep and some of the drifts were up to eighteen inches.

Just before midnight my seventeen year old son woke me from a sound sleep to inform me that he had gotten stuck, in the road, in front of our house, on his way home from work. He said that he had been trying for quite some time to get his car unstuck by himself, and now he really needed my help. Since my husband had been called into work earlier to spread salt and plow snow and hadn’t yet returned home, I had to get up. I went out and rocked the car for about ten minutes, and maybe moved it a whopping five feet closer to the driveway. That’s when I realized that little Escort just wasn’t going to push its way through a foot of fresh snow.

I trudged to the barn and started the tractor and began pushing snow to clear the remaining fifteen feet to the driveway. Around 1am I was happily back in bed, unfortunately my joy was short lived. I was reawakened somewhere between 4 and 5am by the continuous revving of an engine. I groggily thought, “Surely it will stop soon,” and tried to go back to sleep. But it didn’t stop; it went on and on and on. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got out of bed, put on three coats, gloves and barn boots and headed outside. It was still dark, and now there were two vehicles in front of my house.

I moseyed down to the barn and got the tractor out again, thinking “how can I be the only person to hear all this noise?” An hour later I had the road in front of the house cleared enough so the cars could pass. By now it was 7 am so I made some coffee and checked for school closings. Yep, school was closed, the phone rang and a neighbor wanted to bring his son over so he could go to work. Great, now I had his ADHD child along with my eight children, five of whom have ADHD as well, snowed in happily altogether. Well, Happy Valentine’s Day, I could tell this wasn’t going to be one of those romantic, flower and dinner kind of days.

My foster daughter had to be to work at 9am, so I prayed we’d make it there as we walked out the door and that the rest of the children wouldn’t kill each other or destroy the house before I returned. I was so thankful when Valentine’s Day was finally over!