Hearts and Crafts

During a recent trip to the post library's storytime, Kathleen showed a lot of interest in the arts and crafts portion of the program. This wasn't entirely surprising. We pull out the crayons and paper or stickers and coloring books (or some combination of the aforementioned) at least once a day. But the storytime craft offered a new (well, new-to-Kathleen, anyway) tool that Kathleen found to be a revelation in fun -- a gluestick. Kathleen could not get enough of the glue stick! She was happy to glue down anything that stood still. "Gluestick!" she'd chirp, as she'd rub it on the construction paper, the table, her fingers... By the end of the morning I literally had to peel her away from it.

Kathleen's enthusiasm for the gluestick got me to thinking about different arts and crafts we could do at home. Suddenly, I had the perfect excuse for a trip to the scrapbooking store! Now, I've not gotten my act together to the point where I can actually scrapbook, but I will happily buy scrapbooking supplies. I just love the paper and ribbons and the pens and the tools... Sadly, though, they generally sit in my scrapbooking storage container, unused and forgotten. But Kathleen's love affair with the gluestick meant that I could buy fun Valentine scrapbooking supplies and that we could actually use them. We could make Valentines!

So, on Sunday (while Daddy and Grandpa were living it up at the ProBowl) the girls and I sat down to make Valentines. I thought that the activity might require some explanation for Kathleen, but I'd forgotten that Caillou (her favorite TV character) made Valentines for his friends. Kathleen knew exactly what was going on, and would yell out, "Makin' Valentines!" as she worked.

(Sorry for the dark and blurry photos. Daytime photos are a little hard inside our cinderblock house!) Kathleen showed her own artistic style, arranging punched circles of pretty paper and little foam hearts in a distinctly modern way. Madeline supervised. And when Mama wasn't supervising quite enough, she even got in on the action:

Watch your mailbox, friends, because a Valentine might be headed your way!