Shot Through the Heart

We decided to try our hand at homemade Valentines this year for Simon’s preschool buddies. Though I had never thought about it until Rebecca mentioned it, I too prefer to pass out not-candy Valentines, and I found these cute twig arrows via Pinterest. Although I originally had visions of gathering sticks with Simon and passing a happy, you know, half hour or so days in advance cutting out the felt parts while Simon neatly glued them in place, it probably goes without saying that’s not how it happened. Jason and I got them all wrapped up right around midnight the night before the party. Still, procrastination and romanticizing the process aside, these were in fact as easy to make as they looked and practically free (I had all the materials except the baker’s twine, which I found in the dollar section at Target), and I just love how they turned out.

I got my first taste of how homework might look for us in the years to come, as I asked Simon to write his name on the tags. Hoo. We made it, but it took a lot of patience from both of us. Frustrating for him was that he sometimes started out too big and ran out of room and sometimes would inexplicably jumble up the letters. A few times he got so flustered, he called out, “Skip!” and abandoned the tag partway through to just start over. On the whole, though, he was really proud of himself, and as he finished the last three or four tags, he brought each of them to me in turn and said, “Look, Mommy, I think this is my best one yet!”

My very favorite part of the story is this: I ended up having to use a few of the “Skip!” tags — including my favorite one, which was very neatly written right to left (nomiS). I tied the not-quite-as-perfect tags to red arrows, thinking that he would surely keep for himself one in his favorite color. I was surprised to see that he came home with a blue arrow in his Valentine bag. I asked why he didn’t keep a red arrow, and he told me he wanted to keep one with his best writing on it.