happy valentine's day!

last night was rough!  wait, let me backtrack:

i hate store-bought valentines!  you know the ones-- you rip them apart, fold them, fill out the "to" and "from", and stick them in a ziplock baggie in your kid's backpack.  and these days, most teachers prefer them to be left blank, so they can just shove them in each kid's bag in a couple minutes and call it a day!  this practice is soooo impersonal it kills me!

i thought the point of valentine's day was to celebrate love and friendship!!  years ago, kids would sit with construction paper and doilies and glue and ric-rack and make special, one-of-a-kind valentines for each of their closest friends.  and now, we chuck unlabeled cartoon character cards in bags, making sure we have "one for everyone in the class!!", with absolutely no sentiment!

6 years ago, my son, who is now 8, began celebrating valentine's day in preschool, and i refused to go the store-bought route.  so what did i do?  i gave him watercolor paints, brushes, and doily hearts, and i helped him paint one for each of his valentines.  and they were beautiful!  and he loved handing them out to each of his friends and his teachers too!  and all was right with the world!

over the years, i've had another child, and both my children have more and more classmates as the years go by... and of course it's gotten much more difficult to make 20 or 30 valentines from scratch for each of them!  so we started baking cookies...

cut to last night:

one kid played video games, the other one (tired w/a cold) went to bed early, and i was left alone, for over 2 hours, to bake over 5 dozen heart-shaped, colored sugar- and non-pareil-sprinkled cookies-- mixing, rolling, cutting, dusting, baking, cooling, bagging, labeling...

i'm absolutely exhausted!!!  and i often wonder if i'm just putting in way too much effort!

that being said, i love valentine's day!  i love seeing everyone in their red and pink, girls in their prettiest dresses, bows in their hair, boys in collared shirts!  i love opening up heart-shaped boxes, collecting handmade cards (i did receive one or two), and eating pink cupcakes!  and i especially love hearing how wonderful it was that i brought some of my cookies in to share with my coworkers!

happy valentine's day!

rhonda :)