Happy Day After Valentine’s Day friends. Hope yours was filled with love — the exact kind of love you were looking for, whatever that may be.
Lucy and Zoe celebrated Friendship Day at school yesterday. Each student brought in valentine friendship cards to hand out to the other students — one for every kid in class. For Lucy that meant 23 cards. For Zoe, 22.
“Heck!” I said, back when we first got the notices about Friendship Day. “Why make plain ole cards? Why not make 45 hearts out of melty beads and hand those out instead?” And for some reason, everyone agreed with me. Silly silly family.
But thanks to the cheap child labor, we were able to complete this project without outsourcing. We started almost a month ago, and filled much of our plentiful spare time with making hearts. This consisted of filling a small heart-shaped tray with a hundred or so colored cylinder-shaped beads, arranged in a lovely colorful pattern, of course, and then ironing them. The heat from the iron melted the beads and fused them together so the heart could be removed from the tray and stand alone. Zoe and Lucy worked on them during the day. And at night, while watching Season 1 of The Riches on DVD, Bob and I worked on them.
Then Wednesday night after dinner we assembled them all, looping white tags festooned with Sharpie red and pink hearts. 49 total (we added 4 so the girls could give one to each teacher).
It was triumphant. Jubilant. A huge undertaking with a beginning, a middle and a proud, celebratory end. We’ve never done a long, drawn-out project like this with Lucy and Zoe and they did great. They were excited about the initial idea; they didn’t get tired of it, even after weeks of making hearts; and they saw it through to the very last white tag. And they were so happy to be giving the hearts away to their friends. I don’t know how they came by such a zen approach to belongings, but they love sharing things they love with people they love. Bob and I spent lots of energy talking about the hearts — our favorites, the most unusual, the amazing diversity of them all. Every single one was precious to us. But Zoe and Lucy had no hesitation giving them all away — not one word of reluctance — and came home talking about the next melty bead project we were going to undertake.
I, with my pack-rat ways, could learn a lot from them.
As usual.
xo, L
so incredibly lovely. i bow before you.
xo
Gorgeous!
Wow, that is great in a crazy way. It was all I could do to cut out paper hearts and glue them together (then let Ada stamp and color on them). 14. We only needed to make 14.
Amazingly wonderful story and pictures! When I was a kid we undertook this giant rediculous project because we were a silly silly family too. My mother invited 100 ladies over for a lunch and decided that she would give each and every one of them a homemade loaf of grandmother’s recipe orange bread as a parting gift. This involved removing the peel from oranges and then chopping the peels and then candying the peel and then making the dough and then folding the chopped candied peel with its syrup into the lightly sweet bread dough. We bought GIANT bowls for mixing up 10 loaves at a time, and we worked on it for weeks. It was one of my most memorable childhood memories. And people wonder why I took to Martha Stewart. Now you’ve created a time-proof memory for your kids. Love it.
PunditGirl loves these things. I wish I had thought of this idea.
Question:Friendship Day? Have we gone PC with that now, too??
I love this idea! How gorgeous.