Valentine’s Day approaches.
My son, Boaz, and I – of course – want to show his mom how much we love her. Last Valentine’s Day, he was 1.5 years old and loved helping … even though Valentine’s Day meant nothing to him. We spent $1 on the project and it took us about 30 minutes.
We started out by going to Wal-Mart, where we spent a few minutes in the Valentine’s aisle. Boaz pulled a few boxes of cards off the shelf that caught his attention. One was dinosaur-themed, one had characters from Sesame Street, and one featured holograms of large construction equipment. The last one he picked contained cliché-y Valentine’s Day phrases from Veggie Tales. I laid all four boxes out on the floor and told him to pick one out for mommy.
A few seconds later, we were buying a box of 27 cards with quotes from our favorite vegetables for $0.99.
Once we got home, I grabbed a red marker and a red crayon and put Boaz in his high chair. We opened the box of cards, which also included a page of heart stickers. I separated the perforated cards carefully and began writing MOM in the “to” section on each card with the marker. I put a heart sticker over the “O” in MOM just to spice it up a little.
Once I finished a card, I gave it to Boaz and showed him where to write his name with the crayon. Surprisingly, his stamina and attention span held out for most of this process so that I only had to forge his scribble on a couple cards at the end.
We then folded the cards and put a small piece of tape on the corner of each card so we could stick it to various items around the house often used by mommy.
Boaz went wild putting one card on each of the cabinets along the floor in the kitchen. We also tagged items like her laptop, pillow, keys, hairbrush, coffee maker, makeup bag, etc. We finished this project the day before Valentine’s Day, but my wife was still finding cards we had hidden a week later. She appreciated the special effort, and Boaz had a blast showing her his signature each time she found another Veggie Card.
My only regret is thinking we should have gone for the heavy duty construction holograms. Thankfully, Valentine’s Day comes around each year.
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For additional Valentine’s Day gift and celebration ideas, check out our guide to the day.
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Picture by Yoori Koo; Used via Unsplash license.