The Making of the Valentines

There are a lot of firsts that come with your child's first year of preschool. One of them is helping them make valentines for their classmates. When I realized this, my stomach clenched for just a second.

You see, I am not the craftiest of people. I did not enjoy art class in school. I've always felt clumsy with art supplies. As my stomach unclenched, I became determined that we were going to make our own valentines (there's nothing at all wrong with bought ones, I happily gave those out for years in grade school). I just needed to conquer my "art fear" once again, and come up with an idea.

As good ideas tend to happen, the pieces for the valentines seemed to fall into my hands at the right time. I had to buy the white paper doilies I saw in one store, and some dog and cat heart stickers that were hanging right next to them. When I found some foam red, white and pink hearts, I knew we were good to go.

Rosie and I sat down to make these, and she was very excited. She enjoyed gluing the paper doily hearts on top of the foam hearts. I admit, here, that my OCD tendencies tried to fight their way in, and I had to restrain myself from straightening the hearts (I know, bad, isn't it?) But the important thing is, I didn't. I let her glue the hearts the way she wanted to, and lo and behold, the slightly off-center hearts looked good. So much better than my OCD hearts would have looked.

She put stickers on each of the valentines, and we wrote the names. The last step was to tape small bags of valentine fruit snacks to the back of them. This was not a decision I made lightly. I had hemmed and hawed over what treat Rosie should give out. I don't even know if you're supposed to in preschool! See, I really don't know much about preschool etiquette at all. Maybe every one does the store bought cards and no one gives out treats. Maybe everyone makes the best Pinterest cards you've ever seen and there's the most sugary candy you can imagine attached to it.

I have no idea. I figured fruit snacks were a safe bet.

I'm excited for Rosie's very first valentine's day party. It also coincides with their pajama day, which I think is awfully cute. I have very fond memories of valentine's day parties at school, opening up every valentine, eating healthy snacks being on a fun sugar high. It'll be interesting to see how much things have changed since "my school days". I'm still willing to bet it'll be her favorite day of school yet.