Valentine’s Day is coming up, did you know? I’m pretty bad at explaining these “lesser” holidays to the kids. Maybe I’m too cynical… or boring… or something. But I’ve been trying with this one because Lex is supposed to make Valentine’s Day cards for his class. So far he’s pretty uninterested, even going so far as to say “But Mom, I don’t love my classmates!” Hard to argue with that. I’ve learned in these four short years with him to choose my battles carefully, and this will not be one of them. However, I still have two weeks to discuss it with him :)

This afternoon we talked about Valentine’s Day and while the kids colored with their “new” crayons I got out construction paper and scissors and made some hearts. He was happy. Then I made him a Valentine and he was VERY happy! I told him that the kids in his class would also be very happy if he made them Valentines. We talked about a few different ways to make cards and whether or not he had to write “Happy Valentine’s Day” on each of them. That’s a lot of writing for a kid! I left a tray of hearts on the table next to his list of classmates and told him that he could do what he wanted with them, offering to help if he wanted help. We’ll see how it goes.

My Valentine to Lex. He liked it so much he glued it to paper and added his own orange touches.

Have you seen our new art wall?

We had a crafty afternoon today. Thankfully, because yesterday we had a crappy afternoon!! I finally got around to a project we’ve been talking about for months (years?!) Not sure why it takes me so long to get to such things, especially easy things like this, but it does. For awhile now we have been collecting old and broken crayons is a special “to be melted” box. Not sure the kids knew what that meant, but they were eager to help. Today we actually melted them and made little crayon cakes. It was a very easy project. Put muffin liners in the pan, sort the crayons by color (or not) into the liners, filling about half full. Bake in the oven at 250 for awhile. The instructions I read said 5 minutes, but ours took almost 20 minutes. Not sure why. The instructions also said to watch carefully because crayons are flammable?!?!?? We watched VERY carefully. The last thing I want in my oven is burnt crayon smell! But after about 20 minutes they were nicely melted and we took them out to cool. An hour or so later the kids had a blast coloring with their “new” crayons. I kept thinking how much they look like Reece’s Peanut Butter cups. Yum :)

So pretty

Crayon cakes

Eve makes pretty swirls with her crayons