Cut to the chase...Valentine...

Please - do NOT get me wrong...I love Valentine's Day! It brings back memories of my childhood. Endlessly scrutinizing each and every Valentine given and received to see if some sort of "hidden message" was implied because the cute boy in the class gave you a "bigger" GI Joe Valentine than your best friend...and vice versa.

Now that I am a Mom, I still scrutinize each and everyone of the Valentine's my daughter's receive. Not to look for any secret love messages...but to see what "Mommies" have "one-upped" me once again. Carefully prepared packages with pencils, hand-crafted and hand-tied with ribbon and glitter - each one more elaborate than the next.

My daughter's first year of pre-school at the age of 3 found her coming home with 26 Valentine pencils, 18 heart-shaped erasers, 253 packages of Valentine stickers, a set of Flash cards, 4 plush teddy bears holding little red hearts and a double chocolate fudge cake. The poor thing toppled backwards down the stairs due to the weight of her over-stuffed Barbie back-pack. I felt like a mommy failure - my daughter...only armed with her 26 Dora Valentines with little white envelopes that I spent licking closed until 2 a.m the night before. The paper-cuts on my tongue were nothing compared to the giant stabbing pain in my heart that somehow I had missed the "mommy memo" regarding "old-fashioned" Valentines traditions were a thing of the past.

Then...reality set in...

I had another kid, my workload doubled, and I came to the realization that I am NOT one of those moms. I do a mini victory dance around the kitchen if I even remember that it's Valentine's Day...or Easter, or my daughter's 6th birthday. So...we will continue to hand out the small paper Valentine's cards until the day my daughter finds a part-time job.

I must admit, however, my 6 year old daughter surprised me last night (yes...we were doing Valentines the night before at 9:00). She took each and every one of the 21 Valentine cards and carefully thought about each one. On the front of each envelope - she wrote a personal message to each classmate. Some standard "I love you" messages (concernedly all boys) and "You are funny" were the majority...other's were written messages like "Boo hoo" (an inside joke, I am told) and "You are speshle" "I lik your blu hat". The point was, she thought of each and every classmate, and tried to individualize each one in her own way with messages and pictures of freaky heart shaped heads. My absolute proudest mommy moment last night was when she was pondering over one of the last cards for a little boy. She stared off into space...trying to come up with some sort of personal message - when suddenly she shrugged her shoulders, grabbed the marker and wrote two giant question marks on the front of the envelope. When I looked at her for clarification - she shrugged again and said "He's really confusing"...

That's my girl!!