High Maintenance Mom

Today is the 200th anniversary of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Happy Birthday! There are over 600 events scheduled in over 40 countries to celebrate Darwin Day 2009, a global celebration of science and reason. And today is also the day before most schools celebrate Valentine's Day, which to my kids is one of the most fabulous days of the year and to me is a day to practice handwriting followed by a year's worth of sugar and red dye number 5...

I was really shocked last year when I went to B's room in kindergarten for Valentine's Day. I had assumed many kids would bring cards since the teacher sent home a list of every student's name. What I wasn't prepared for was the bags of candy stacked up by the wall at the beginning of the day. It seemed as though every child gave out not just cards but also huge amounts of sticky or sugary candy. By the end of the day B had a bag full of things I avoid that rivaled his school's Halloween celebration. Needless to say, we had to struggle to eat a real dinner before eating more candy. I also bought some of the candy from him, like I do for Halloween. Bedtime wasn't that much fun either.

Of course there are lots of positives about Valentine's Day for kids. In addition to teaching kindness, sharing, and including everyone we also really like the handwriting practice. B hates to write and while it's painful to get him to do it, the only way he will improve is if he keeps trying. I remember the girls in his preschool class drawing and practicing letters while B ran around outside. By the end of the year most of the girls had very thick art books while B's had about four pages in it. Last year we struggled but B (5) wrote all his Valentines's himself and N (3) signed the letter N to all of his. One year later and B happily wrote to all his classmates, plus teachers, plus 10-15 extra friends. And N wrote both his friend's names and an abbreviated version of his name. Luckily N's class is much smaller but he really worked at it and we're looking forward to handing them all out - with pencils.

Here's a post from two years ago when both kids were in our play-based Reggio preschool that didn't celebrate holidays, Valentine's Day preparations.