Valentine's Day 2015 Recap

Dear Em,
We had fun, low-key, snowy Valentine's Day celebrations. You were so excited to wake up Friday, because it was the day you got to hand your Valentines out to your friends & classmates. Even Lamby & Bitty Baby were all dressed for the special occasion.

When I picked you up from school, you were bubbling with excitement & chattered adorably about all the fun you had at school. You were so tickled & surprised that Daddy & I had included a Valentine in your lunch box, & told me all about the Valentines you also received from your little classmates.

While I finished up a few work items, you & Daddy were secretly working on a project together. "Don't come downstairs," you firmly told me again & again. When I was finally admitted downstairs, you & Daddy had planned a wonderful Valentine's Day surprise (& you couldn't wait until the next day to give it to me). The two of you took a number of pictures that led me on a scavenger hunt throughout the house. At the end of the hunt, there was this...

Your precious words brought tears to my eyes. I tackled you into a hug first, & then we invited Daddy to join us in one, great, big group hug. You two are the best Valentine's a gal could ever have. We ate dinner together that night & then went through all your Valentines, letting you read the words of each one to us.

The next morning, you woke up early & excited. You came into our bed to snuggle, a big smile plastered across your face as you gave us our Olaf Valentines. With a blizzard in the forecast, we swapped our traditional Valentine's Day dinner at Taco Bell for Valentine's Day lunch at Taco Bell.

Big, chunky snowflakes had begun to fall by the time we finished lunch, & you tried to catch the snow flakes in your hands & on your tongue as we headed to URI, the place where Daddy first become my Valentine.

We met up with friends, & went to your very first URI basketball game. I was surprised. You were really into the game for the first quarter. You adorably cheered along with all the Rhode Island cheers. By the second quarter (as suspected), you started to get antsy. "Mom, why didn't you tell me basketball was so boring," you asked me solemnly. I gave you my phone & asked you to take pictures of the best parts of the game. What a surprise, most of your photos were of the cheerleaders & not the basketball players.

After the halftime show, you & I went for a walk. We picked up a megaphone & two pompoms for my cute, little cheerleader. You cheered with your props as we walked back to our seats, leaving the people around us to laugh & smile. When we got back to our seats, you cheered & danced & screamed & whipped your pompoms around. "Mom, I don't even need the megaphone. I'm really loud without it!" Ha! It's true. I got quite a few looks from Daddy as he got whipped in the face with your pompoms & you screamed in his face with your megaphone. It's possible Daddy was taking applications for new Valentines. Still, we had a fun time at the game, on the campus where our little family first became a possibility.

The snow was still falling quietly on the ground as we drove home, & we snuggled in under blankets to watch movies for the rest of the night.

It was the perfect, simple Valentine's Day with my two favorite Valentines. Being a wife & a mom has been one of the greatest joys of my life, & I'm beyond blessed to share my home & my life & my heart with two of the most amazing people I know. I love my forever Valentines.

I love you so,

Mommy

Throwback Thursday: A Walk Through Valentine Making Memory Lane

Dear Em,
We had so much fun making your Valentine's this year. As we worked together, I smiled thinking about all of your past Valentines. Most of them turned out pretty cute, but some were pretty miserable to make.

We started out fairly easy. Your first Valentine's Day, you were not even two months old. We had a little Valentine themed photo shoot, & I used the pictures to make photo cards for Daddy & our parents. At a month & a half old, it was tough to get photos of you where you were looking at the camera & not moving or crying.

But just look at that cute, teeny, little bum.

The next year we did the same thing, a photo shoot & photo cards. This photo shoot proved to be even tougher. You moved around a lot & ate most of the props.

2012 was the first year you had classmates to give Valentines to, & we got a little more creative. Our Valentines still involved a photo shoot. I asked you to hold your hand out in a fist. We printed your photos with a message & slid lollipops into a slit in the photo. Your Valentines became 3D & looked like you were holding out a lollipop to your friends. These Valentine's were cute & fairly easy. At the age of two, you couldn't understand why I wanted you to hold your hand out in a fist...I don't think you even understood what a fist really was. I finally gave you a clip to hold in your hand & asked you to hold it out to me. We ended up with an OK shot. We should have called it a day at that point, but I decided to get fancy & make hand print Valentines for our friends & family members as well. They came out cute, but my little Valentine was pretty Valentined out by then. You were a cranky mess, & I realized maybe I had overdone things a little.

Of course after overdoing things the previous year, in 2013 I decided to take overdoing it to a whole new level. You had studied owls in school that year, & I found adorable Valentine owl bags that we could put together. You were really into it...for the first two bags. Unfortunately, I think we made 40 of them. Of course I had to add another owl making Valentine project, which involved a lot of cutting & using the hot glue gun...which pretty much meant you couldn't even participate in that portion of your Valentines. Then we made cookies (because I felt guilty your Valentines didn't have a candy/treat component)...which may have happened after you were already asleep, because, lets face it, we were both exhausted from making your Valentines that year.

The next year, I was still burnt out from Valentine making & we decided to go back to the 3D lollipop Valentines. We did another photo shoot, & I realized we should never have a photo shoot before you've eaten breakfast. In the end, we got a cute photo, & you helped create your Valentines by writing your classmate's names by tracing over what I had written in yellow marker. There were only a few tears involved in the creation of those Valentines, & I called it a success.

This year, I decided to take a new approach. I looked up handmade Valentines on Pinterest, & asked you to look through them with me. As we scrolled through, I let you pick out your favorite. You chose a cute, little Olaf Valentine. I shouldn't have been surprised that the Valentine you chose was Frozen themed.

Here's what we needed.

- Printed Cards (free download from One Creative Mommy)

- Markers to address Valentines

- Stickers (optional)

- Pretzel sticks

- Candy Corn (since it's out of season, I ordered it from Amazon)

- mini chocolate kisses

- regular sized marshmallows

- mini marshmallows

- M&Ms (preferably brown)

- plastic bags

- a stapler

It looked fairly easy to make, & I was confident this was a Valentine we could work on together. We downloaded & printed the free file (we printed extras to allow for mistakes). I cut them out into rectangles. Armed with a list of your Valentines, you addressed each one all by yourself. You read off each name on your list, tried to use what you thought was that person's favorite color, & carefully wrote out each name. It took you quite a while (you have over 30 Valentines this year). You worked so hard, & I watched from a distance, beaming with pride. I couldn't believe that you were working on your Valentines ALL BY YOURSELF. You made a few mistakes, but you remained very patient.

After you were done addressing your Valentines, you had fun adding some extra decorations. You added Frozen, heart, & winter themed sticks to the backs of each page. You were very careful to try to use each person's favorite colors & Frozen characters. It was really stinkin' cute.

Once we were done, we filled the bags together with the melted Olaf goodies. Each bag had 3 large marshmallows (the body), two mini marshmallows (the feet), a candy corn nose, two pretzel sticks for arms, two mini chocolate kisses for eyes, & two M&Ms for buttons (we tried to use brown, but once we ran out we used other colors). It truly looked like bags of little, melted Olafs. You passed me each addressed Valentine, & I stapled them to the bags.

They came out really stinkin' cute, & you loved every moment of making these Valentines. There were no Valentine tears this year!!! Perhaps the secret is in letting you pick out an age appropriate Valentine project. Please remind me of this next year!

I love you so,
Mommy

To see some of our past Valentines, click on the following links...
2012: Hand print Valentines & 3D Lollipop Valentines
2013: Owl Valentines
2014: 3D Flower Lollipop Valentines

Happy Valentine's Day 2014

Dear Em,
Happy Valentine's Day, to the little one who fills our house with more love than I could have ever dreamed of. I mean sure, there are some moments that look like this...

And there may be moments that go something like this...

But they're all worth it, because there are moments like this...

And in the moments in between there are lots of snuggles! There are tons of snuggles!

You were thrilled to head to school with your Valentines in hand to give out to your teachers & sweet little friends. We sent Daddy to work with his own little love note. I am not so thrilled to be spending my morning getting a cavity filled (which is as big of a reminder as you can get to stay away from the sweets this holiday). Yuck! At least I have tonight's annual fancy restaurant date (at Taco Bell) followed by snuggles & bedtime books to look forward to. 

Thank you and Daddy for giving me all the love I could ever need & way more love than I could ever deserve.

I love you so,

Mommy

Throwback Thursday: 7th Grade Valentine's Dance

Dear Em,
Valentines Day is tomorrow & I thought we could start the celebration a little early with a TBT photo from my 7th grade Valentines Day dance. I think I had just gotten a new camera for Christmas that year & was excited to take lots of photos of my friends (it seems that the obnoxious photo taker in me started early). As you can see, I was a fantastic photographer right from the start. I almost got half the words from the background in the photo, & some of my friends are actually making eye contact with the camera.

Of course, no middle school dance would be complete without time spent (possibly crying) in the bathroom. Ha!

Sigh, it feels good to have made it through my middle school years.

I love you so,

Mommy

Our Valentine's 2014

Dear Em,
We started thinking about making Valentines early this year. I think it was just after Christmas when our Oriental Trading catalogue came in the mail. You started flipping through the pages in search of the perfect Valentines. Of course, when you came to the page that pictured our Valentines from last year, you excitedly told me you wanted to make owl Valentines again.

I was not as excited about a repeat owl Valentine year. I know you studied owls in your classroom recently & we embraced the owl theme with Halloween Owl Cupcakes & Christmas Owl Ornaments, but I was over our Owl Valentines. I loved them, I really did, but for starters, they took forever. To add to that, you didn't get to participate as much as I would have liked. I really wanted to make your Valentines together. I saw some cute flower Valentines in the catalogue that looked fairly easy to make, but then I saw a way to make our own. I thought about how perfect the lollipop flowers would be with the picture Valentines we made & loved two years ago.

I talked to you about my idea, & you were excited about it. So, photo flower Valentines it was!

Here's what we used:
- photo back drop (totally optional)
- camera
- printed 4X6 photos with a Valentine message
- crepe paper/streamers
- lolly pops
- tape
- exacto knife
- markers

The first thing we needed was pictures of you- which meant photo shoot time. I wanted to do something a little different for the background of this shoot. I made an inexpensive & easy (but time consuming) floating heart backdrop for some heart filled fun.

I also wanted pops of color & made a backdrop out of fabric. For that I needed, 2.5 yards of five different kinds of fabric in pink & gold hues (I used mostly sheer kinds, but thicker, more solid fabrics would have worked as well. Some of the fabrics I chose were sparkly, & they made a sparkly mess throughout our house. Lucky for us, we like a little bit of sparkle), a roll of ribbon, & fabric scissors.

I cut each piece of fabric lengthwise into strips that were approximately two inches wide (it doesn't need to be exact). Once all the fabric strips were cut, I began tying them to a piece of ribbon that was approximately two yards wide (smaller if you want to cover a smaller area & larger if you want to cover a larger area), being sure to rotate the colors as I went. The finished product was a very sparkly, colorful, Valentine's backdrop.

I hung up the backdrop using tape & asked you to stand with your arm held out until we got the perfect photo. There were some times you wanted to kill me, but we were both thrilled to get the perfect shot of you for your Valentines (or maybe you were just thrilled to be done). I edited the photo with added text & had forty copies printed.

The next thing we had to do was make the flower portion of the project. I bought two rolls of streamers in red & pink for less than a dollar & three bags of Valentine themed Tootsie Pops. I knew you wouldn't be able to help me cut out the petals & waited until you were in bed to start that part of the project. I folded the streamers into multiple layers so that I could cut the petals out in bulk while I was sitting down & watching TV.

I thought you would be able to help me with the petal assembly part, but it was actually a lot harder than I thought. I ended up layering five petals on a small strip of tape, placing the lollipop on top, placing a petal on top of that, & trying to tightly wrap the tape around the lollipop. I was actually having such a tough time, we almost nixed the flower idea altogether. But I figured I already had the materials, & if we were going to reuse the same Valentine idea, I felt like we had to up the anti a little.

Except that here I was working on your Valentines without you again this year. Sigh. It was in the middle of this frustration, that I had a great idea. I asked you if you wanted to write names on the back of the cards. You were thrilled to do anything to help. So, I wrote the names of each of your friends & family in yellow on the back of each card. You happily traced over each letter with a pink or purple marker, sounding out & reading each name as you went along. I wasn't originally planning for your Valentines to be a lesson in reading & writing, but it made my heart happy to see how content you were that it was. You were so pleased with yourself each time you correctly sounded out the names of your best friends, & I was so amazed & proud to see how much you're learning & developing.

I cut 2 little slits (probably less than quarter of an inch diagonally) in your Valentine photos, one just about your fist & one just below it, with an exacto knife. Then I slid the lollipop flower stems into the slits & fastened them with a piece of pink washi tape on the back. I think they came out wicked cute. They are probably my favorite Valentines yet. Plus, your very own writing gives them that extra personalization from sweet, little you (you even wrote one out for me...all by yourself...spelled M-O-M-E for Mommy).

While you won't hand yours out at school until Friday, we mailed some to our family already. You've been thrilled to know how surprised & happy they've made some of our very favorite people. I have to admit, your Valentine makes me feel quite loved this Valentine's Day.

I love you so,
Mommy

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