I Heart You!

Lucky for me, today's theme for Works-For-Me Wednesday is all about Valentine's Day ideas. I happened to have posted a whole article of budget-friendly ideas for the holiday last week, so please stop over to the article to get tons of ideas that won't break the bank!

On a related note, I attempted to do Valentine's this year with my son. Now being the frugal self that I am, I realize that the store-bought cards are really not expensive at all. You can get a ton of them for a couple of dollars that have dogs on them and say, "You're Top Dog!" and such...They are very nice and we have done that in year's past.

This year I decided I wanted to make the holiday a little more meaningful and with only eleven kids in my son's class, we could definitely swing actually making the cards this year. I was proud that we did it because it required more effort than the store-bought hearts and it was a creative way for the two of us to pass another snow day at home.

Since the weather was bad, all I did was pull all of the red & pink construction paper from his craft bin. I would have loved to incorporate doilies, but after seeing them going for $4.99 last week, I decided that we could do without these. The idea was to save some money, not spend four times as much!

I did have some of those cool jagged scissors that the scrapbookers use and by cutting all my hearts out with those, it gave a pretty lacy effect on the hearts and also on the edges of the cards.

I sat everything out for my son to put his cards together including a big box of buttons and a glue stick to incorporate different dimensions into his work. He came downstairs with a piece of paper (not provided for this mission) and covered it with buttons saying he would rather make lots of planets instead of doing the task at hand.

I then came upstairs to redirect his attention to all of the paper I had cut out for him and all of the pretty hearts and what happened next was exactly what I had expected...I sat and made Valentine's for an entire hour while he made planets on other sheets of paper.

Me: "Do you want to even sign your name on these?"

Son: "Nah!"

So much for being a fun & creative mom! Maybe there are more creative ideas on Rocks in My Dryer as mine was not inspiring enough even for my own kid!