We have been hearing a lot about Valentine’s Day lately. Most years it comes and goes without us realizing it (somehow I’ve got in my head that February is post-holiday trough month where I don’t really have to think about cards or presents or anything like that.) (Wrong.) Apparently the Valentine’s Day party at Friendship Montessori School is a whoopdeedoo for the ages. The kids get nearly apoplectic when talking about it.

I vaguely recall my grade-school years, and must admit that Valentine’s Day sits fondly in my memory. I especially enjoyed going around the classroom and putting my cards into other kids’ shoeboxes. It seems my fondness for mailing stuff has held over into my adulthood.

Anyway. I resisted the urge to purchase Valentine’s cards at the store. For one, I was too lazy, and the thought of wading through aisles of Valentine’s dreck was exhausting, and for two, if there’s one thing we have a lot of around here, it’s stuff to make things with.

So I opened up all my drawers and went on a search. I found the makings for some magnets. And there were exactly sixteen magnets – perfect for Alden’s class. Alden wrote each of her classmates’ names on a little paper circle I cut out. The paper circles get glued between the magnet and these little glass magnifying beads.

Actually, in full disclosure, I had to make the circles at 200% so they were big enough for Alden to write on and then I had to scan them and reduce them back to the right size. This is the sort of annoying thing we do all the time around here getting illustrations into books, so it wasn’t as complicated as it sounds.

And Alden was pretty pleased with the results.

Since we only had 16 magnets, we had to figure out what to do for Kato’s classmates. I did some more rummaging around and found a bunch of coil bindings that were extra bits we had snipped off of some books we had made for Idiots’Books. They were much too small to make actual books from, but I figured we could make some mini kid-sized notebooks.

I trimmed some extra scrap paper we had lying around (we have lots of that, too) to the right size. Kato helped punch the holes.

The puncher is pretty simple and just requires a good pull down on the handle.

Kato became a punching machine. Each book required 3 or 4 punches, so we had our work cut out for us. But Kato was into it, and punched pretty steadily, until:

he needed a boogie break.

That really was the only thing that slowed us down.

Putting the wires through the holes proved to be a bit too tricky for 3-year-old hands, so I agreed to help him out.

In not much time at all, books were finished!

Looks like Kato will have no excuse not to help out next time we’re printing and binding a bunch of books. I had no idea we could train him so fast! Think of all of the years we’ve wasted with Alden already!

So, all the projects were finished with time to spare. This was pretty exciting. It wasn’t until last night around 7 o’clock that I realized Alden couldn’t really just hand out her magnets – that they should be in some sort of envelope or something. There wasn’t time to go looking for cute little envelopes, so we just ended up stapling them in between a couple pieces of construction paper that Alden wrote names on. They make these fun little pillows that can be ripped open. Hopefully, no one will get stabbed with an errant staple in the process.

And all this was because the idea of finding Valentine’s cards was too exhausting. It’s a far cry from Martha (seriously, check out that link) but we’ll work our way up. Maybe by the time the kids are in high school we’ll be 100% ready for the Friendship Montessori blowout.