Valentine’s Day runs a close second to Christmas for our little girl – The hearts! All that pink! Candy! How can she resist? As soon as we take down the tree, Ella is thinking ahead toward Valentine’s Day. She can’t wait to get started on creating little love notes for everyone she knows.
Ella feels a kinship with Fancy Nancy with her love of the glamorous, girly, and fancy, so she pulled out Nancy’s Heart to Heart before January even came to a close. Bree and Nancy adore (adore is fancy for really love) making Valentines, of course, and Ella simply had to follow in their footsteps. I took my inspiration from the book and decided we’d make some old school Valentines.
I ran to the store and returned home with glitter pens, 3 kinds of ribbon (with sparkles, of course!), construction paper, stickers, and doilies. No Pinterest instructions needed here – just our imaginations, a glue stick, and some objects of our affection. These simple purchases were well worth money – Ella has dedicated herself to Valentine making for about 2 weeks now. She can’t get enough of it.
This year is a bit different as well because Ella can write her own notes, which makes the whole process even more exciting. Her teacher – perpetually planning ahead – had the children creating Valentine’s bags two weeks in advance, then told them a week in advance that they could bring in Valentine’s for their friends. Needless to say, I was unprepared. We had to run out that night and buy Ella’s Valentines. We accidentally chose the suckers you can write on directly. This proved a challenge for Kindergarten hands, so she brought those to school the next day (she couldn’t wait to add them to her cards) and has labored over little hand cut hearts with a note for each friend during the week since, bringing a small batch to school each day.
I wish these pictures included lovingly made fabric colored baskets to organize and keep all of our art supplies, like my mom had when I was little. While it is a big, jumbled, messy mass of fun instead, the creative process is a love note to my mom who inspired the idea to throw “project ideas” to the wind and just have fun with a few simple supplies.
No complicated crafts here – just seeing what happens when you fold a piece of paper in half, put glitter hearts on one side, then press it down.
Finding out what happens when you just start gluing.
Discovering new uses for ribbon.
Or seeing the sweet nothings your daughter lovingly creates one at a time for each of her classmates.
I can’t wait to head out tonight at bedtime and sneak in a few Valentine’s Day surprises for tomorrow morning!
So cute! I got little almost tears at her adorableness!