Cal's Un-Valentines

Our Valentines to Our Kids
(homemade cards and cupcakes)

Dan said on Wednesday that Valentine’s Day is “just another Hallmark holiday.”  I disagree (I think he may, too), and that opinion is not based on any knowledge of the history of the holiday.  I liken Valentine’s Day to Mother’s Day and Father’s Day – it’s a nice checkpoint during the year to go out of your way a bit and let the special people in your lives know that you love and/or appreciate them in a not-so-everyday way.

Getting to Valentine’s Day was hard work, though, in large part due to a head-strong, uncooperative Cal.  Over the weekend, I bought some Valentines for the kids to give to their friends at school.  I remember when I was in school at the handing-out-Valentines age, Valentines were pretty much a palm-sized piece of heavy paper with a cute picture on it, tagged with a simple message like “Be Mine” or “You’re Cool” or “Too Cute.”  On the back were two lines labeled “To” and “From” for kids to fill out accordingly.

Even the most basic of Valentines today are fancier.  They “do” something.  The Valentines I bought for Cal were car-themed – a fairly generic car on one side that folded around a small sheet of stickers that were to be used to decorate the generic car.  There were four different cars with four different sets of stickers, and each had a simple “Happy Valentine’s Day” sentiment on it.  I chose these Valentines because I figured the kids might enjoy decorating the cars with the stickers.  For Ella I bought some Minnie Mouse Valentines that had the traditional simple Valentine messages on the front of them (four different messages on four different cards) and two hearts on the back in which the “To” and “From” names could be written.  What made these fancy were that they came with Minnie pencils – there were two slots on the side of each card through which a Minnie pencil could be positioned.

Fortunately, the kids are in the daycare kind of school where class sizes are limited.  If there are 8 kids in Ella’s class, I’d be surprised.  There are more than that in Cal’s (I think), but not more than 12.  The Valentines I bought came in packs of 16 for 3 bucks a pack.  So my kids each had 16 Valentines to “sign.”

I started the process of getting Cal to sign his Valentines on Monday.  I asked a couple of times, “Cal, do you want to sign your Valentines now?” Each time he responded, “No.”  We had time, so I didn’t press him.  Tuesday came around, and I asked him again.  He actually did sit down at the table and filled out three Valentines, all of his choice – one for Ethan, one for Kalen and one for Ella.  How sweet. Instead of doing more, say, for Mahima or Carmen or Alex, he opted to draw another Valentine for Kalen using the Sharpie pen I had foolishly handed to him to sign his Valentines.  This “project” evolved to involving scissors and ultimately some tape and never amounted to whatever it was he had envisioned in his head and which never would land in Kalen’s hands.

At any rate, I didn’t press him to sign more Valentines on Tuesday, knowing we still had Wednesday.  Big mistake, Mommy.  Don’t you know your head-strong kid?  Wednesday came around and we must have asked him 15 times over the course of our short evening (before dinner… after dinner… probably even during dinner) if he wanted to sign his Valentines.  Each time he answered, “No” and opted instead to jump on the couch or swing his pseudo cowboy rope (aka robe tie) around like a whip.

Why does this have to be so difficult?  Images of Cal’s friends cooperating fully and signing their Valentines for their friends flashed through my head.  Some (like Addie and Carmen) were fully engaged; others (Connor and Kalen) were distracted by the goings on in the background in their homes.  But they were all signing away.

Well, what do we do with this?  I first tried peer pressure.  I thought that maybe if he saw Ella enjoying “signing” her Valentines, he might jump in and want to sign his.  So I propped Ella on my lap as we sat at the island in the kitchen and… gulp… handed her a pen.  Her Minnie Valentines were spread out in front of us back-side up to maximize likelihood that she’d hit paper instead of counter.  And then I guided her through the signing process.  I’d loudly spell her name, enunciating every letter to draw it out a bit, “Eeee… ELlll…ELlll… Aaaa.”  As I spelled she spelled, “Eeeeeeeeeee… Yaaaaaaaaaaa!” and scribbled to her heart’s content.  We did this with every one of her 16 Valentines, giggling as we worked our way through them.  Every one of them was "signed" by our not-yet-2-year-old.  And not once over the course of those 20 minutes or so did Cal sit down at the counter to join us.  Peer pressure did not work.

In the grand scheme of things, whether Cal gives a card that costs less than 19 cents to each of his friends who can't read anyway is not life altering for any of these kids.  I don't actually remember if Perry Romanowski or David Bosko skipped giving me a Valentine one year as kids (heck, maybe they didn't ever give me a Valentine).  The gesture alone is not significant; but the collection of like gestures is.  Giving Valentines is like making a simple "happy birthday" phone call to your cousin on his birthday.  It's simple, doesn't take much time or effort and makes the recipient feel good.  It's just a nice thing to do.  And I want my kids to learn that.

Note to Miss Ally

But I don't want to do it for them. What would they learn from that?  So with Cal's cards unsigned as he went to bed on Valentine's Day "Eve," I knew I wasn't going to sign them for him. I also knew I wasn't going to send him to school without Valentines.  I figured (perhaps more appropriately "hoped") he might regret not having some Valentines to give to his friends during the festivities the next day, and this made me sad.  And to be honest, there was a small piece of me that just didn't want to be "that mom" who "forgot" to buy Valentines for her kid (even though I hadn't forgotten and even though what others think of me without the full story doesn't matter).  So I threw his unsigned Valentines into a Ziploc bag and included a note to his teacher that basically said that we tried but couldn't get Cal to sign his Valentines and that I thought he might want to sign them before giving them to his friends in the moment.

I really believed that would work.  I believed that he would get caught up in the excitement of the moment and sign them (or buckle to peer pressure when he saw other had signed theirs) before handing them to his friends.

Cal returned from school that day with a bag full of Valentines from his friends as well as the Ziploc bag full of his unsigned Valentines.  The kid didn't even hand them out.  When I asked him why he muttered something about Miss Ally either saying "no" or just not reminding him to do it. Whatever it was, I wasn't buying it.

As we opened all of the Valentines and Valentines gift bags from his friends, Cal didn't pay much attention to whom each was from but briefly played with each of the toys in the bags.  And with every Valentine I jealously said to myself, "see, Olivia signed hers... Sydney signed hers... Mahima, Kalen and Connor signed theirs..."

When we picked the kids up at school this evening, I had the pleasure of having this brief, sweet exchange with Carmen, a friend of Cal's in school, one who's been at the school as long as he has:

Carmen: "Did you like my Valentine?"

Me: "We really did!"

Carmen <excited>: "We made it. My mommy did the owl and I cut the paper!"

Me: "You did?! You did an excellent job!  It was very creative.  We really liked it!"

Carmen <not yet satisfied>: "Did CAL like it?"

Me: "He did!"

And that's what it's all about.