Monday, February 11, 2008

Valentine, I think you're the fly!

Jeffrey needed to get some Valentines for school but wasn't even interested in going to the store to pick them out. I knew if we waited much longer there would be only the most awful ones left and I wanted to spare my son from having to give out anything with Barbies on it. So I went to Rite Aid and Tim came along because he wanted candy. I got him Laffy Taffy Joke Valentines, and because they come in a box of 22 and there are 30 kids in his class, another box of Gummy Bug ones. Since there was (another!) snow day today he didn't get the list of names. A girl from his class, Alexa, takes piano at our house and saw what we were doing. She quickly advised us to get out the directory because it has classroom lists and that's what she used when she wrote out her valentines. Then she informed Jeffrey that she had selected one with a hippy themed tatoo for him. The ones we had turned out to require a difficult and complicated assembly and the spots to put the names were hard to write on without smearing it.
Next thing you know I was doing it all while Alexa rattled off her opinions of each of the classmates from the names list and Jeffrey made silly jokes to get her to laugh. I threatened to write "Jeffrey's Mother" in the "from" box but that still wasn't enough to get him interested.
I guess Valentine's day is more of a female thing. I know I remember carefully considering exactly what message should go to each classmate. And I'd do it days in advance and use a special color pen. Selecting the design of the card was a vitally important decision and it had to express the just right image. I still remember some of the ones I had, they used to come in books and you would punch them out like paper dolls. Jeffrey didn't even look at what I did. So then he won't know whether or not I drew a heart on one to a certain girl...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Happy Valentine's Day to all four of you there!! I am skipping your address for the few being sent, as the boys are too old to sketch some for my refrigerator, and I couldn't find one with the word blog in it for you. Jeff's disinterest in the whole card tradition makes me think that someday he will be like that guy in the commercial buying beer, who picks up a greeting card for his wife without even reading the message, and the last scene is showing how thrilled she is because he was so thoughtful about the sweet,special message card.
Aunt Chris

Anonymous said...

Happy Valentine's Day to all! I shall make Zenon's favorite meatloaf in the shape of a heart. The family of my primary patient gave me a box of chocolates, and a picture of the baby! Life has some nice rewards.

Mindy said...

I hope you had a happy Valentine's Day. By now it should be know what Tim was doing while I worked on Jeff's cards: making special Valentines for his Great Aunties! Hopefully the vellum envelopes didn't cause them to get lost in the mail.