Valentine's Day

C, being C, spent a week making funky personalized valentines for everyone in his class at school. We knew that no other kindergartener would have exerted that kind of energy, but we were sad to see that only one other kid in the class had made her own and most of the rest of them were REALLY hideous. In my day, storebought valentines were pretty lame, but they were actually cards with envelopes. Now they are generally 2 by 3 pieces of paper folded in half, and I suspect that it's virtually impossible to find them without licensed characters on them. I find it disturbing that 5-year-olds think Bratz are cool. We very glad, however, that the valentines weren't all the over-the-top gifts that C received in preschool, each with a goody bag of candy, pencils, games, etc. attached.

C's friend Karen, whose family owns the Chinese restaurant, did have a card with an envelope- a "thank you" card in fact, inside which she had (probably painstakenly) written "Happy Valentine's Day" and her full name. We're not sure whether her parents are opposed to the other valentines available, if that's just what they had on hand, or if they figured that was what this bizarro tradition called for.