This is the current state of my kitchen table.
Valentine’s Day is Thursday so we are knee-deep in making valentines, creating games and gathering materials for two elementary school parties. This is the eleventh year that I’ve helped kids with this holiday. When they were bitty and it was new, the novelty fueled all sorts of high maintenance homemade valentines (Bad Piggies cubes to color, fold, stick and fill, or lily pads to trace, cut, and hot glue rubber frogs to, butterflies to trace, cut, fold and add glue sticks to, glow sticks to shape into lightsabers, and so many, many, many construction paper hearts to trace or fold, cut and decorate). Now that they are older, our momentum has lagged and for the first year ever, the youngest found and I purchased store-bought valentines to give away.
*A caveat. Know that I love a good craft and will labor over the details longer than I should because I ENJOY it, not because I feel the need to “keep up”. Thankfully, their preschool and elementary school environments have never felt like a mommy-war battlefront.
My older son is in seventh grade, camped out in that awkward field of no-longer-a-kid-but-not-really-a-teenager-yet, so Thursday will be more like a regular day for him (with maybe a valentine for a good friend). But for the younger two, Thursday includes the obligatory hour-long classroom party complete with games, slightly soggy pretzels, a bottle of water that will be tossed before it’s finished and napkins that serve no other purpose than marking the spot on their desk where their plate belongs. We’ll play a few games, maybe do a craft, and of course, exchange cards- kids marching down rows, serious in their postal delivery jobs.
We’ve passed the novelty, muscled through the demand and we’re creeping up on the “it’s almost over”. This is my younger daughter’s last ever classroom party. She’ll join her older brother next year in the purgatory of middle school. After this year, our youngest will only have two more Valentine’s Days to celebrate in school.
Two.
Will they remember all the work we did every February? Will our practice writing, cutting and creating leave a mark in their memories like it has for me? Probably not.
So I sit here, hands cramped over the scissors, wondering if I soaked it in enough to count. Will I look back on these days and feel good about what we did? Will I laugh at the time we spent scouring the internet for ideas and shopping for just the right supplies- those hours wasted? What will the coulda shoulda wouldas be? It’s just hard to know.
At the end of the day however, I just don’t see myself looking back on these days and regretting the time I spent with my kids, chaperoning field trips, preparing party treats, highlighting the letters they had to trace on their valentines, fat fingers wrapped around giant pencils. Three years from now, my kitchen table probably won’t look like this, but we’ve sure put it to good use in season.
Happy Valentine’s Day.