An Almost Funny Valentine's Day Story

I think every parent has one or two main fears when it comes to their kid. Some moms hover over their infants bed to watch for signs that he's stopped breathing. Some moms constantly run to the doctor, convinced their child has a new disease. Personally, I'm always afraid NJ will be kidnapped. The thought haunts me and will even keep me up at night (that's a big deal for me) occasionally. I try to lay it all before God and trust that he will watch over my son, but that piece in the back of my brain will sometimes remind me that God never promised us that our children will always be safe. We live in a fallen world and often suffer the consequences of someone else's actions...

Anyway, I had a horrible kidnapped dream Friday night. I think we were at some sort of street fair. The point is that someone took NJ and I spent my dream running up and down the streets screaming his name and breaking down sobbing. -not one of my favorite dreams. When I woke up, it was to the sound of NJ coughing and crying. I've got to tell you, I have never been so happy to hear my baby cough and cry. So, that's how my Valentine's Day began. A little traumatic, but I woke up, so it's all good. Still, that kind of dream tends to haunt me the rest of the day.

Fast forward a few hours. I've got the radio on and NJ and I are playing and vacuuming the family room (he LOVES the vacuum). Out of the corner of my eye I catch some sort of movement in the kitchen. My first thought is that NJ threw something- he does this a lot, but when I turned, he was standing right behind me. As I'm trying to convince myself that my eyes were just playing tricks on me, the memory of my dream seeps back in and I decide that I better check it out anyway. I operate under a general rule of thumb that it's better to face my attackers head on than let them sneak up behind me and slit my throat without me ever seeing it coming. So, I slowly walk around the bar and then TOTALLY FREAK OUT when there's actually someone there!

Now let me stop here and tell you that my husband and I have a strict no-sneaking-up-on-someone-in-their-own-house policy. People get shot doing stupid things like that! So when I say I totally freaked out, I mean I screamed, the adrenaline kicked in and, fortunately for my husband, I stifled the fight reflex by immediately sobbing. I honestly don't know what I would have done had his face not been the first thing I saw.

Turns out he had gotten off work 2 hours early and gone to get me flowers on the way home from work. But he hates going places in uniform, so he was wearing his workout clothes, which were, of course, black. All he needed was a ski mask and he would have been the perfect perpetrator.

Apparently, he wasn't planning on sneaking up on me, but when I didn't hear him come in, he thought it would be cute to get NJ to take me the flowers, so he was trying to get him to come over and take the flowers before I noticed. Unfortunately, Nj was too enthralled with he vacuum, and like me, hadn't heard daddy come in over the ambient noise.

In the end, NJ did carry a bouquet of flowers, although I had to encourage him to come to me- he was a little apprehensive with mommy sobbing. Someday I'll probably laugh about Valentine's Day 2009.