Happy Valentine's Day

I didn't even realize until about 10 am this morning that I hadn't put together a blog post for today. Why you ask? How could I forget something I've been doing for four and a half years now? Well, perhaps it's because I had four hours of sleep and fell asleep on my bed last night with my laptop on my lap trying to finish up classroom Valentine's cards. Sigh. Clearly things didn't go quite as I had planned this week.

Ridiculously, I was already thinking on January 1st about what fun, creative idea we could come up with for a classroom Valentine this year. I knew February 14th would be here in no time. So weeks ago I started researching ideas online. I picked this little idea then much to my chagrin, it blew up all over the internet in the ensuing weeks. So I'm just hoping there aren't ten other kids in the class doing the same thing. Fingers crossed.

I was hoping to buy bracelets, but didn't want to order them and have to pay for shipping or buy them in a huge lot. Then time flew by and I couldn't find what I was looking for in stores. So two nights ago the ugly reality that I was going to be making bracelets hit me upside the head. Thankfully I already had a friendship bracelet kit in my craft supplies so late that night I started cranking out bracelets.

I learned a lot about how to unwind embroidery thread which is notorious for becoming a big knotted mess, and over two nights came up with several strategies to speed things up. This was fantastic because in the beginning it was taking all together tooooo long. I thought I was going to lose it.

I did quite a bit of very late night scrambling to pull these together. I fell asleep at 2 am last night and then thankfully woke up at about 6:15 this morning (long before the every day alarm) and still had to design the card  and put everything together. It was a scramble for the next 90 minutes. Whew! But we made it and were on time to school.

Now to enjoy the rest of the day. We knew we wouldn't all be together much today so last night we had a little Valentine's Day time and we'll have some more fun tonight together. We're all wearing a new wristband with a silver coin on it that says "Love this life."  So today, while we're full of love and loving each other, we're remembering to love the life we have, the time we have, the people we have. It's a good reminder! Happy Valentine's Day!