A mother's little lessons from Valentines Day

With the internet, blogs, and pinterest the ideas and options for how to help your kids make their own Valentines cards are endless.  I found a couple of ideas I liked primarily because they seemed easy and cheap and I thought my kids would like them.  I went for the "melt your own heart shaped crayons" and the "glow stick light sabers."   I wanted to make pretty hearts like these or these.

The crayons turned out to be much more work than I had anticipated (see my friend's experience, who agrees with me)-(random people's blogs on the internet always make everything seem so easy), but luckily we managed to make one batch, which had 14 hearts and LUCKILY for me, Rebecca only has 14 girls in her class. Phew. So, one batch did it. 

The light sabers weren't hard, but when you multiply a craft by the number of kids in a class everything starts to become a chore.  I was originally going to cut them all nice and evenly, and cut out red card stock and glue the white light saber pictures to the card stock (because I had just printed them on plain paper), making them stiffer and more fancy looking.  After just finishing the first step I had already had enough. 

As far as the heart crayons go, the ones you see on people's blogs have printed out sayings like: "You color my world" or "For crayon out loud, won't you be my valentine?" and they look very cute and professional.  We managed to cut up some cardstock and tape on our heart shaped crayons and barely managed to get everyone's name handwritten on there with the phrase: "Happy Valentines Day!"

But Lesson number 1 was this:  IF YOUR KIDS ARE HAPPY THEN YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY, TOO!

My kids didn't care that I had added extra card stock, extra stickers, glue dots instead of tape, or fancy sayings printed properly from the computer.  My kids felt like they had made the Valentines themselves and were pleased with the results, AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS!! Not whatever perfect craft person's blog I'm comparing myself to. 

Lesson number 2: it is more important to HAVE YOUR KIDS DO THE CRAFT than to have the craft turn out "picture perfect." 

My kids were so happy to do it themselves (until they got tired of signing their names).  But their joy was my joy.  (Don't you love how the card I took a picture of doesn't even have R's name spelled correctly?! - So much for picture perfect!)

I saw these beautiful cookies on the internet and wanted to copy them.  What other people's blogs don't tell you is that making cut out cookies with a tired 4 year old isn't all that easy.  Especially when he wants to do it all himself, including rolling out the dough, pressing out the cookies in random places all over the dough and getting the cookies onto the cookie sheet (which isn't always easy to do without breaking them.)  I let the kids do a couple of batches and finished the rest themselves.  I even gave up on the idea of fancy decorating and just had fun throwing sprinkles all over the cookies with my kids.  

Lesson number 3: YOUR KIDS AREN'T COMPARING the crafts you make or the cookies you bake with the ones you saw on the internet that looked "Martha Stewart worthy." In fact, your kids aren't comparing anything  you do to the picture perfect ideas on the internet including your kitchen decor, your mismatched dining room chairs, your lack of Valentines decorations all over the house, or any other thing you might think isn't up to snuff in your own life.  Your kids are just happy you're their mom, and that you took some time to do a little something with them. 

Lesson number 4: SIMPLE IS GOOD ENOUGH.  For Family Home Evening last week we did our Valentines lesson.  We each took a paper heart and wrote one nice thing about each person in the family and taped them to the wall.  We talked about how it is important to love each other.  Voila, the end.  It was short and sweet. 

Happy Valentines Day to everyone! Hope you feel loved by family and friends and that you have a great day.