Count Down to V-day

I am pretty sure that I have blogged about this before, but holidays in my house growing up were the best. My mom always went all out to make sure they were special for us. I have thought about this a lot since becoming a parent. I want my kids to look back and think "wow mom always went above and beyond to make holidays special for us." I am definitely still a work in progress and have a long way to go before I am at my mom's level, but I am working on it. This year though we have added several new dimensions to our Valentine's Day celebration and it seems like preparations have taken over our lives.

First off, we have our usual type of things planned; heart shaped sandwiches at lunch, heart shaped pizza for dinner, decorating sugar cookies with pink frosting, cards, and flowers. This year I also decided to add delivering homemade cookies and special Valentine's quotes to all our visiting teaching and home teaching families.

For the first time this year we also have the preschool dimension. This means coming up with Valentine's themed crafts, snacks, and goody bags for 18 small people.

Also for the first time ever, since Merrick attends both preschool classes, we have classmate Valentine's to prepare.

I feel like I am complaining right now and that was not really my intention. For the most part all the preparations have been fun and maybe even made me feel like a better mom/wife/teacher. It is just that I was looking around today at the goody bags for preschool, the cookies I was making, and watching Jeremy and Merrick work on his Valentine's and could not help but think that for a "smallish" holiday that is still almost a week away, it really has taken over.