Valentine's Day

I am not one to really like holidays.  I mean, I like the holidays where we can get off work, but those are rather few and far between, so I guess I have come to see holidays like Valentine's Day as just another way that the stores market to us and take our money and get people to buy their kids candy and useless stuff that ends up in the rubbish or in the donation bag almost as soon as it comes in the house.

But, now that our family is expanding or perhaps because our Elizabeth is growing up so fast and I have started to realize that she only has 5 years after this school year before she goes off to college, we have began to make a concentrated effort to spend more time together as a family creating traditions and memories that will stick with the kids as they grow.  It is actually interesting to me that this concept has only recently hit me.  Perhaps it is because Elizabeth was born when I was so young and then there were so many years between her and Jo.  During those years we were a very nontraditional family and she was my awesome sidekick that explored the world with me.  Perhaps that is why it did not really hit me until recently to try to establish some some of traditions that the kids can hold on to when they are older.

So, I decided that it would be a great idea if we would make the Valentine's cards for Jo's class.  There are only 10 cards to be made, so I thought that this would be a great thing to do together. And ultimately, it was!

 It started reluctantly for some.....

 ...but Gabriel and Jo dove right in.

Elizabeth took a little longer to warm up to the idea...Mom, how long do we have to do this?

                                            Of course, our cat Georgie was included.

                       And while Jo was nicely decorating her construction paper,

Gabriel tried to eat the glitter glue.  I guess he wanted to leave me a special
Valentine in his diaper.  That's sweet, but no thanks, Gabe.  I'll pass.

Then the serious work began while I took Gabe off to bathe him.

Yay!  All clean and wrapped in his bunny towel.


I am still kind of new at this whole documenting the production of something, so I forgot to take a picture of all the finished cards!  They were really cute, though, and a big hit in Jo's class.



                                          I did get a picture of this, though....

                                                                         My Valentine