Valentines

When I thought about what life would be like as a stay at home mom, I had some misperceptions. I thought I’d be the mom who sent in special treats for holidays at schools.  We’d do arts and crafts after school.  We’d give homemade presents to our family for Christmas – you know, the stuff we found on Pinterest.

In reality, I’m the same mom I always was.  I still buy store-bought goodies for holiday parties at school, usually purchased on the way to school the morning of the event because I forgot to buy them ahead of time.  I spend the bulk of my days driving kids around, not planning our next craft.  And most of our Christmas gifts came from Amazon.

But for Valentine’s Day, I finally knocked it out of the park.  No other kids will have Valentines this cool.  Seriously.

Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Bribed, cajoled, begged, pleaded and finally yelled at my kids until they would stand still for a photo.  It took Eleanor about 20 shots to get this right.  Ayub did it on his second try.  He isn’t one for wasting time.

Step 2:  Have enough pictures printed for each child.

Step 3: Using a craft knife (see, this is getting kind of crafty, don’t you think?), cut two slits in the photo.

Step 4: Insert heart-shaped sucker and tape to the back so it won’t be jostled out by anxious kids digging to the bottom of their Valentine bag looking for “the good candy.”

Step 5: Deliver to school with a beaming child.

Honestly, these are so cute it kills me.  (Would have been even better if I could have talked Eleanor into combing her hair, but after I already made her change into a red shirt, there was no room left for bargaining.)  So here it is…my first big success as a stay at home mom.

You will not that we only did these for two of my kids.  Lucy is not incredibly cooperative in posing for photos – you have to catch her in her natural habitat.  As for Sam…sniff, sniff…he’s too old to give out Valentines to his friends.