Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Valentine’s Day is just going to keep getting more complicated, isn’t it.  Today we pulled out the boxes of Valentines we picked up for the girlies–AND the instructions they each brought home from school.  (I’m kind of disturbed that there are instructions.  I absolutely don’t want kids to feel left out, but the whole thing seemed simpler when I was in school.  Then again, it probably seems simpler to my girls, too.  Maybe what you have to do as a parent hasn’t actually changed that much…)  My four year old is supposed to bring 30 Valentines–NOT addressed, although they may be signed.  Treats are optional (and yeah, I’m the mean kind of mom who is NOT going to add any more sugar to that mix.  I still remember teaching at Sylvan at 5:30 in the evening on Valentine’s Day.  It wasn’t pretty.).  My seven year old has 23 kids in her class–including her–and a list of names was kindly provided.  (THANKFULLY she can tell me which ones are boys and which ones are girls, because I sure would have guessed wrong in at least one case.)  For this let’s-do-Valentines-while-your-brother-is-napping party, my husband and I picked up 2 boxes of Doc McStuffins Valentines, 1 box of Sofia the First Valentines, and one box of (much cheaper) Lego Star Wars Valentines.  The last we picked up because we have nephews we figured would love the stickers, and the boys in the seven year old’s class could get them too, right?  (Call me sexist if you want; I’m guessing they’d prefer that to the Sofia the First notepads, but my seven year old LIKES Sofia the First, so that’s what the girls are getting.)  Well, that’s all well and good, but the reason the Lego Star Wars box was cheaper for twice the Valentines was because it came with a postage-stamp-sized sticker per Valentine, with no way to affix the sticker without rendering it unusable for the recipient.

Hmmm.

My current plan is to buy a pack of something like Dum-Dums and tape one on each boy Valentine.  The girls are going to need to be happy without candy, since they’re already getting a Sofia the First notepad (the preschoolers are all getting Doc McStuffins notepads; since we can’t address the Valentines and don’t have a list of names, the boys are just going to have to live with that).  This whole process, of course, brings to mind making cards with my mother–yes, making cards.  My mother has an art education degree–she finished it while I was in junior high–and we made Christmas cards for my classmates with red thumbprints that were magically transformed into a reindeer by a woman who didn’t pass much of that particular talent on to me.  (I remember attaching peppermints to the cards one year; I was good at the taping part.)  To my Mother:  every day I am a mother I realize a little bit more how amazing you are.  I hope I’m not failing my children by taking the easy-Valentine-way-out.  (Of course, it didn’t feel easy to everyone.  Signing her name thirty times completely exhausted my four-year-old.  She’s got an August birthday, meaning she might be the youngest in her entire preschool class, and printing is still very laborious for her.)

Anyway, after this whole laborious process, I felt the need to make treats tonight, because, well, I wanted to eat treats.  (Isn’t that why everyone makes treats?)  I went through one of my ten dessert boards on Pinterest (sadly, not an exaggeration) and found something easy enough to appeal to me on a Sunday evening:  these Coconut Blondies.  Mine had more calories than these, of course–I don’t generally throw away egg yolks for random treats I’m just trying out, and I don’t keep stick margarine in the house–and so they should have been even better, right?

Meh.  I was underwhelmed.  My husband said they were ‘ok,’ and that’s exactly what they were.  Ah, well.  I imagine the kiddos will enjoy them with us…