Cheap, Easy, & Sweet little Valentine Crafts

Dear Em,
I often feel a little bad & then overwhelmed about how so often the crafts I choose for the two of us end up being crafts mostly done by me. Last year's Valentines, this year's Christmas craft, & even this year's Valentines (I'll post more about them tomorrow)- there were components you helped me with, but a significant part of each project I had to do on my own. When we scheduled a double sleepover for you & your best friend this weekend (one night at our house & one night at hers), I really wanted to give you a craft the two of you could do independently (you both love crafts).

I was in the midst of another project, when I spotted the crafting aisles of Michaels. I felt like I hit the "Em can do these crafts" jackpot. I probably spent less than $10. I bought pink foam picture frames, foam hearts with sticky backs, glittery foam flowers with sticky backs, & glue.

We've never really been glue people in our house. For the life of me, I can't really remember my mom ever giving me a bottle of glue & letting me glue away either. It always seemed to invite the possibility of a really big mess & a lot of sticky to me. The fact that you enjoy using half the bottle to glue a piece of paper the size of a dime to a larger piece of paper was deterrent enough, but then I noticed you & your classmates using glue at school. I also noticed a lot of your friends creating crafts with glue at home. It was Mommy guilt/peer pressure at it's finest. So, I sucked up my fear of a sticky disaster, & bought the glue.

Daddy helped me by cutting out ten larger hearts I had traced on white card stock. I used our heart punch to punch out hearts in a variety of different papers. Then I cut out squares of different colors of tissue paper (I was originally going to punch out hearts, but it turns out the heart punch doesn't work well with tissue paper). We took out our markers too.

I gave you & S your large hearts (five each), put bowls of decoration supplies in front of you, handed you the glue, and told you to have fun (after I showed you really quickly how little glue you need to glue a piece of paper the size of a dime to another piece of paper).

I have to admit, it wasn't easy giving you a mess in a bottle glue & walking away. I thought you would be thrilled to have the glue in your hands. Instead (& to my wild delight), you & S mostly used the foam hearts, foam flowers, & markers.

The best part? You both spent over an hour creating such sweet little masterpieces...all by yourselves.

I love you so,
Mommy