A Crafty Nurturer

At my last Mothers of Preschoolers meeting, we were asked to describe ourselves in one word. The tricky part was that we were given a list of words to pick from. It was a lot harder to do than you might think. I picked the word from the list that I thought best suited me, nurturer. Then we all went around the table and explained to the other women why we picked that word for ourselves. Funny enough, 4 of the ladies sitting at my table would have picked nurturer for me as well, but the other 4 ladies at my table picked the word crafty for me. One lady sitting at my table exclaimed "It would seem that you're a crafty nurturer." I like that! :-)

So, for my most recent crafty nurturer project, I helped the kids make their own Valentine's Day cards to take to school for their classmates. I got the idea from an email newsletter that I get from the Disney website. February's newsletter was packed full of great ideas for homemade cards. I've placed a link to the website on this page, to the right, if you'd like to get some ideas of your own. Here's what we made.

For Isaac, I purchased small buckets and shovels from The Dollar Tree, and wrote on a little heart "I really dig you!" Samuel wanted to make bumble bees made out of pipe cleaners for the girls in his class. We wrote "Bee Mine" on the hearts, and he signed his name. For the boys in his class, Samuel wanted to make camouflage hearts. We wrote "You're out of sight!" on the hearts. And for his teacher, he wanted to make a basket- weave heart. I was a little amused that he picked 3 different hearts to make, but at least he was showing an interest in this activity, so I just went with it. And they all turned out so cute!

Avery wanted to make butterfly cards for all of her classmates. She decided that for the girls in her class she would make the butterfly wings out of pink hearts, and for the boys she would make red hearts. We took heart-shaped lollipops and made that the body of the butterfly. We glued on some fancy antennas made from pipe cleaners, and glued on some googly eyes too. And there you go... homemade butterfly Valentine's Day cards! I thought these cards turned out really cute too. I think these were my favorite.

And because we absolutely wanted to include Amanda in all the fun we were having, she wanted to make camouflage hearts for all of her classmates. She made pink camouflage hearts for the girls, and red camouflage hearts for the boys. She made all 21 cards by herself because she wanted to. Didn't she do a great job?

And this might seem like an off-the-subject question, but did anyone catch the interview on Dateline last night with the mother of octuplets? I'm not trying to open up a can of worms here, but hearing her speak about her children, I could tell that she truly just loves children and wanted a big family. I understand that. Seeing the images of her with her children, I could tell that she has a nurturing spirit. But honestly, how on earth does this poor woman think she will be able to manage 14 children by herself? Wow! She has received a lot of negative publicity, and perhaps some of it is justified because she made the decision to bring those children into this world without any thought as to how exactly she would care for all of them adequately. But the reality is that she has 14 kids now whether we agree with what she did or not, and there simply is no way she can manage it all by herself. Think about the feeding time alone that will be involved for those 8 tiny newborns. She's going to need to come up with some pretty crafty nurturing techniques in a hurry... I wonder if there's a website for that. :-)