A Project for ME

For the last few years Valentines Day in our house has kinda come and gone. My birthday is shortly before, we are trying to be frugal with our money, and sadly we had a beautiful neice who was born on Feb. 13th 2007 and returned to our Father in Heaven the following day...Valentines. Needless to say, it just has not been the Lovey-Dovey time it used to be before kids and worries and money.

I MISS VALENTINES DAY!

And so for my first project of the year (unfinishd projects from 2009 do not count) I am making a Valentines Advent Calendar with some friends. The point of this calendar is to not only get us excited for Valentines Day but to also give my family the oppertunity to tell eachother how much we love and appriciate one another. Can't you just see the sweet things my 5 year old will write about her younger sisters - well if we start now perhapse when the girls are older they will have developed a good habit.

There will be 14 pockets stitched onto a fabric heart. The first thing you need to know is that this project is inspired from an snazzy lady, Abby at "A Feathered Nest." (http://projectsforyournest.blogspot.com) She made an amazing Christmas Advent Calendar (http://projectsforyournest.blogspot.com/search/label/Christmas%20advent%20calendar) that I fell in love with. I knew that Christmas 09 was out and so I thought 'Hey what about Valentines Day.'

This is how mine will work. Each day we will place a tag that has a family members name on it, onto a clothes-pin which will in turn be attached to the calendar day (pocket) we are on. Example Feb. 1st will be pocket #1 and the tag will have the name Han Solo on it. So on that day each member of our family, other than Han Solo, will write a little love note about Han and place it in that pocket. On Feb. 2nd I will change the name tag on the clothes pin to Ewok the Eldest and move the clothes-pin tag to the second pocket. Everyone will then write a love note to her. This will continue until Valentines Day when we will write a love note about our family as a unit. We have five in our family so this means each Ewok will get 12 love notes and Han Solo and I will get 8 each. There will also be 5 love notes about our family. We have a Valentines Dinner as a family (fancy clothes, sparkling cider and the works) on Valentines and that is when we will take out all our little love notes and read out loud as a family to each person. Our Ewoks are still learning to read and write and so this will be less personable than it would be if each person reads his/her notes to the family member they are speaking about.

Ahh, here come the questions.

'How will you know who wrote what about who?' Well, I thought about that and came up with this solution. Each member of our family will have a pen of a particular color and paper of that same color. This way we know that the pink paper with the blue writting on it is a note from Han Solo to his eldest Ewok. The easier version is to just write 'to' and 'from' on one side of the paper and the note on the other (I have a particular knack for making life more complicated than it needs, to be becuase I love color and organization- such a complicated fetish).

And so there it is. This year for Valentines day there will be a beautiful cake, good food, sparkling cider, and 57 little love notes collected from a handmade advent calendar. That sounds Lovey-Dovey and excellent!

I am excited and THAT is acomplishment #2 for 2010!

I guess I should not count all my Ewoks before I land on Endor and so I will periodically be posting the progress and hopefully instructions so you can get excited and creative too!