We are in full Valentine’s Day prep mode.  Can you picture us making hand-made roses with pipe cleaners and hanging them from the light fixtures?  Baking red cupcakes with pink frosting?  Expressing our love for each other even more than we usually do morning, noon and night just to get in the heart spirit?

OR

Going to Target (OF COURSE WHERE ELSE) and choosing Valentines for the kids myself because the thought of bringing them with me and watching them make these types of decisions is agonizing.  But I have to say picking Valentine’s almost made me hang myself right there in the store.  I needed to get the same for both boys to avoid WWIII over whichever Valentine theme was deemed less desirable.  Ok, so I spot a total crap pack of Sponge Bob 2×2 cards (28 in a pack).  There are 15 kids in J’s class and 20 in B’s.  Thank you no one for deciding 28 was a sensical number of Valentines to put in a pack.  Who needs 28?  That means I need to get 46 Valentine’s when I need 35.  And the mini cards are so cheap and terrible that I clearly need to supplement with other junk from the birthday party aisle dollar bins since we can no longer bring in any of the usual, awesome stuff like chocolate in shapes of all the nick jr characters and candy hearts.  Ok, so I finally decide to get 2 packs of 28 and some eyeball rings, rainbow colored stretchy bracelets, and spinny tops because that will look oh so valentiney shoved in a ziplock with a sponge bob mini-postcard valentine.  Yes, that’s my plan and I’m sticking to it.

Moving on I find a much better (should I say higher quality? nah) set of Despicable Me cards with a tiny little notebook for each kid.  Perfection.  Love it.  Done.  Oh wait.  16 in a pack???  Oh come on!?!   Can I catch a break here?  16 won’t work at all because 2 packs of these gets me 3 short and I REFUSE to buy a 3rd pack even though we could probably use it because I know they’ll mess up half and want to hoard at least 7 each just because.  Whatever.  Screw you 16-pack Despicable Me perfect Valentines with the mini-notebooks that kids (boys and girls alike) would enjoy.  Back to totally low-budget half-sticker half-mini postcard Sponge Bobs.

Choosing, writing, and preparing the Valentine’s is another project entirely.   My plan was to save it all for the half day Thursday to fill an afternoon and bring them in Friday.  We could all sit down at the table after school and spend hours and hours happily working on our valentines while giggling and holding hands.  WHAT????  No school Friday?  Damn!  He’ll be exhausted all week after school and I won’t be able to pin him down so we have to do this now.

“Ok, B!!!  Stop watching Superbowl highlights on the iPad.  Get over here now!!!  We have to write out your valentines NOW!” 7:30pm on a Sunday night.

My goal: Pick each card as soon as humanly possible and then quickly write your name and your friend’s name at rapid fire speed just to get it done and get in bed by 8pm because I’ve been waiting for 8pm all day.

B’s goal:  Deliberate heavily over each of the 4 Sponge Bob Valentines to think about who (of the 20 in Kindergarten) really should get a Best Buddies card vs. a Best Friends card.  There are 4 spongebob sticker valentines to choose from.  “Mommy, buddies is just for boys right?  SO I’ll give a boy the Best Buddies Valentine. Hmmm…”  And of course the under-used fully pink “Be Mine” keeps getting pushed aside.  I keep trying to put it in front of him before we run out of the favorite favorite choices and say the girls will like this pink one.  He turns it over and pushes it away to carefully think through who gets the next one.  I’m just watching the clock thinking, JUST WRITE THE NAMES!  YES BLACK THICK SHARPIE IS FINE FOR WRITING VALENTINES.  NO YOU DON’T NEED TO WRITE YOUR WHOLE NAME, JUST THE FIRST SYLLABLE IS FINE.  GO GO GO!!!

Then we need to pick bracelets and spinny tops.  B: “I think D’s favorite color is green so I’ll give him a green bracelet…But Mommy I want a green for me and we only have one green left.  Maybe D will like blue.  But the girls like red and we don’t have enough red but orange is close to red so some can have orange.  Mommy, watch how fast I can spin!  Want to try to spin one upside down?”  (Multiply this by 1000 hours)

Oh and Valentines in a ziplock: not a good look.

On this Valentines, I wish you all speedy Valentines and hope your children have one syllable names so it can move even faster.

Michael, are you still reading?  Roses, diamonds.