Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! I hope your day is full of love and fun and frolicking of all sorts!

It’s the fifth day of giveaways in my Tell Me Your Love Story Series and I’ve got some great news! Someone special, who frolics more fabulously than anyone I know, has a truly amazing gift… just. for. you!

It’s Kelly Lee of Kelly Golightly and she and her most lovely hubby Fred Baby have a poolside photo just dripping with sunshine and glamour just begging to be hung on your wall. And you’d be quite the statement maker… because this photo, along with Kelly and Fred Baby’s other work (check out Kelly’s Instagram… Fred Baby and Kelly work together to make all the Golightly magic happen… now THAT’s a sweet story), is being featured right now at Modernism Week in Palm Springs!

… and I have MORE good news, because all of this love is just making me giddy with giving! I’m extending the giveaway through Monday… winners announced Tuesday… with ONE MORE GIVEAWAY tomorrow!

… now excuse me while I return to my pink heart filled haze…

… YOU my luvs… write away! (Rules here).

Yesterday while Facetiming with my bright-eyed eight-year-old niece in Texas, I asked “Will you be my Valentine?” 

She paused.  “What, do you have a better offer?” I teased.   

 “No,” she said, “I’m just confused about how Valentine’s works and what it is.  But the one thing I know is that Valentine’s Day is for a boy and a girl. So isn’t Uncle HoHo your Valentine?” (She calls my husband Uncle HoHo and we couldn’t love it more).

 “Well yes,” I explained, “the traditional way is that Uncle HoHo is my Valentine, but Valentine’s Day is about showing the people that you love how special they are to you and how much you love them. And because I love you SO much, I was hoping you could be my little Valentine too?”

She nodded and told me she loved me a lot, and then proceeded to ask her best bud, her 12-year-old- dog Ozzy, to be her Valentine.  After hugging his snout, she set down the phone so I could watch her swing, Tarzan-style, from a tree in her backyard.

My heart swelled.

While Valentine’s Day is a holiday that gets a lot of side-eye and shade thrown at it these days, as a hopeless romantic and an unadulterated optimist, I’ve always loved it. What’s not to love about a day where you get to wear lots of pink and red and are encouraged to eat chocolate? And, more importantly, focus on love.

When Dee invited me to share my love story, my first thought was yes, I love that, but I had just shared my and my husband’s love story on my blog. And I’ve already written about the place I love most (my spirit place – do you have one?), so I struggled with what to write about.

But as I watched my niece swinging from a branch repeatedly and gleefully, it hit me: Valentine’s Day is really about a love of life.

We only get one, we don’t know long it will last, so shouldn’t we get busy with falling in love with it?

I’m lucky to share my life with the love of my life, in the place that I love most. But when I trace how that all came to be, the tie that bonds us is really a deep-rooted love for life, seeking and creating adventure at home and abroad, and making the most of this life and the moments that we have together.

So instead of simply raising a chocolate-covered strawberry to our mouths today, how about we raise a glass to life? Isn’t she truly worth falling in love with?

Poolside Golightly By Fred Baby

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