Humans of FHC: Kristin O’Brien

“My husband’s birthday is the day before Valentine’s Day, so we always end up celebrating both at the same time. He’s not a big birthday person, but we usually go out to dinner to celebrate. One of the best ones we did, it sounds really romantic, we went to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse downtown for dinner, and then we went to the auto show next door, and that was our last Valentine’s Day as just us because I was pregnant with our son. Now that we have kids, it’s even more fun. Like last night we were getting all of their Valentines ready, and my five-year-old is in kindergarten so we had him writing his name on all of them and he kept saying, “I can’t handle this! This is too much!a�� It’s like, you’re writing your name over and over, and there are only 24 kids in your class. He has to write their number and their name, and once we got through that we did a couple extra, like one for the principal, and he said, “I can’t do these, I don’t need to do these, these aren’t my classmates! It’s too much, I can’t handle this, it’s too much!a��

We haven’t started any major traditions with them other than the Valentines. My daughter is in daycare so we did Valentines for her, but of course, I wrote all of them because she’s only three. It’s one of my mom’s favorite holidays; the kids always say, “It’s Nana’s holiday!a�� Growing up, my mom made cookies for everything. She’s the cookie-Nana; she still sends us care packages of cookies for the kids with all their favorite flavors and decorates them. It was a tradition to make homemade pizza for every holiday, and we would dye the crust for whatever holiday it was. Like for Valentine’s Day, it was pink, Halloween was orange, green for St. Patrick’s Day– we’ll probably do that going forward with the kids. We just started the cookie decorating tradition with them over Christmas; they wanted to do it for Valentine’s Day but I was just too busy with Winterfest.

It’s fun now, watching my son go through little Valentine’s Day parties. I remember how stressful it was; you wanted to give the right Valentine to the right kid because you were afraid if you gave them the wrong Valentine you didn’t want them to think you like them. I miss doing Valentine’s Day parties, but that’s one of the best things about holidays now-now I get to see it through their eyes and get excited for it all over again.”

(Teacher)