Pinterest for the Win: Valentine's Day

Pinterest has kind of gotten a bad reputation.  It seems like every third or fourth blog post I read makes some mention of how Pinterest is causing us to have unrealistic expectations.  Or to feel that we are inadequate.  Or to send our kids to school with way too much candy on Valentine's Day.

I found this image using Pinterest.

 But I will admit, I'm kind of addicted.  I even love the madness.  Like this site that collects crazy pins (warning:  some of these are impossible to unsee).  Or this mom who decided to bring pins back into the realm of everyday reality. (Although somehow I failed to pin this and had to use Google to find it!)  And finally this site that tests out pins to see if they actually work - often with disastrous results.

And I don't let those fancy pictures fool me or make me feel bad about myself because a) I'm pretty realistic about what I can do, b) I've done some stuff I feel pretty good about and c) I know that my normal day is likely to look different from someone else's best day and I'm fine with that.  It's our own beautiful life.

So these paper beads modeled by Lenny? Well I may have seen better focused or composed pictures on Pinterest, but the actual necklace is made by me from paper he painted. Pinterest can't make me feel bad about it.

Also this painting, created by Lenny and I on the back deck, which I later turned into paper beads (I'm sure I'll make them into some awesome jewelry some day).  Actually, this was my very own original idea, but if you go searching around Pinterest for ideas of stuff to do with your kids you will find something very similar.

Sometimes we don't even need a website.  Really, what you can't do with junk mail, cotton balls and other random stuff from the recycle bin probably isn't worth mentioning!  Lenny took this amazing creation to preschool at the beginning of the year and they put it in a frame because they are geniuses about stuff like that. 

So getting back to the present.  Valentines day is coming.  Last year we made "crazy crayons" and I did use Pinterest to figure out how to do it.  I'm afraid I didn't take pictures because I was pregnant at the time and felt like crap and by the time the project was done I wanted to burn it all down and never remember it again.  It worked though!  I didn't have little heart-shaped molds, and I didn't print the clever little sayings because we don't have a working printer, but Lenny and I had a creative project to work on and I (just barely) avoided losing my mind.

So this year I needed something simpler.  I found this site with Valentines that don't have candy.  We went to the dollar store and got finger pointers that are also glow sticks.  I cut out some paper hearts and wrote "You make my heart GLOW Valentine!" on them (I'm not a martyr, we just don't have a working printer).  Lenny is in to process of writing his classmate's names on them and signing them.

Granted, the original idea looked like this:

And my execution looks like this (with a little tape added to secure the glow finger extension):

And involved this:

And this:

 But like I said, it's my life and I'm keeping it real.  Thanks Pinterest!