Category: Crafts

This morning just after we dropped Ben off, Tabby told me her Valentines needed to be at school today. I was confused. “Today? But Valentine’s Day isn’t until tomorrow!” But in the back of my mind, I remembered reading that on the Valentine’s instruction sheet. We’ve just been so busy, darnit. Ooops!

I contemplated leaving the whole thing until tonight and bringing them tomorrow, but it didn’t seem fair to put an undue burden on her hardworking, amazing teacher – she wants them there early for a reason! I contemplated being tough love mom and telling Tabby that this was her responsibility and she’d just have to do without, but that wasn’t really fair either since she has been busy with swimming all week. Many why does this stuff always happen when I’m playing single mom?? I’ve been trying sooo hard to keep it all together and something had to slip through the cracks, I guess. At least it wasn’t something critical like picking a kid up from school.

We had almost an hour before school started (much less time before I needed to be at work). So we hightailed it home and did a Valentine Fire Drill. Tabby had colored all of her Valentines and cut most of them out. I finished cutting the remaining ones and stuffed them with lollipops as she addressed them, me verbally spelling her classmates’ names for her to speed the process up.

All in all, it went pretty well and pretty fast and I was only about 5 min late for a pretty loosey goosey meeting. But I have a question … when do kids get a sense of urgency??

Well this has been quite the week. As of bedtime last night, both of the kids were DONE and in level 5 meltdown. Tabby lost it when her toothbrush ran out of batteries. Ben was in full revolt because we wouldn’t let him watch another ep of Phineas and Ferb. They both had solid sleep, but apparently Ben had a very rocky dropoff this am. As for me, I started off the week with a stomach bug and now I seem to have caught a nasty cold that has me foggy and semi-useless. Yay.

But let’s not talk about the bad stuff. Let’s talk about the good. I think we’ve finally made a decision on Tabby’s party. We had talked about doing a swimming party at our local rec center, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. If we went when it’s not too crowded, lots of people wouldn’t be able to come since that’s when parents are working and there are tons of other commitments. And the weekends at our rec center (one of the biggest and nicest in the state) is a madhouse on the weekends. I hate taking the kids there on the weekends. A party there sounds about 10x worse.

So we gave her a few options: 1) party at My Gym 2) bowling party 3) party at our community clubhouse with the theme of Secret Agent. As jazzed as she’d been about the My Gym idea before, I expected her to pick that. But she surprised me and decided on the Secret Agent Party. This is great because we can do what I think will be a really fun little part with relatively little fuss and expsense. Relatively little.

The plan so far:

1. Invitations – these will just be half-page printouts with the party info on them (thank you awesome color laser printer at work) and I plan to do a scratch-off over the party details for a little intrigue. But if this turns out to be tedious, we will ditch that idea. We are inviting her whole class (20 kids – it’s school rules to invite all or none) though I expect only about half to show and a couple of other friends from outside of school.
2. Photos – we are bringing out the photo booth and I will make a new template for the photos.
3. Photo frames – I found some cheap white foam frames and I plan to have the kids decorate them with their own fingerprints.
4. Who am I? game – The kids will each get a character taped to their backs and they’ll have to ask questions of the other kids to figure out who they are.
5. Scavenger hunt – The kids will have to follow clues to find the prize (the favors).
6. Favors – found some cute stuff on Oriental Trading; magnifying glasses, secret agent rubber ducks and mustache lollipops and tattoos. I was thinking we could roll these up in crepe paper for those fun surprise packages. Or I may get lazy and just put them in tissue or a bag.
7. Cake – spherical (bomb) cake with chocolate frosting (and perhaps something surprisingly tasty in the middle) and a sparkler for the candle. Maybe I can get fancy schmancy and pipe Kaboom! onto it. Ice cream.

It seems all very doable and not too ridiculous from my point of view. Hopefully I’ll still feel that way when all’s said and done.