Be my valentine and "OWL" be yours!

Let's take a little trip back in time: February, 2011 (ok, not a trip way back in time... just humor me).  Maya had been attending the daycare at our church for about 5 months.  For the first year of her life, she was in the care of one of my besties, so I was still relatively new to this whole "institutionalized daycare" thing.  One day a note came home in Maya's bag to let us know that Valentine's Day was coming up the next week, and I needed to send 22 valentines with Maya for all the various friends she would see in her class over the next week.  A good chunk of the kids at her daycare are only there for Mom's Day Out one or two days a week.  So she saw a different mix of kids nearly every day.  This meant that she was fortunate enough to celebrate Valentine's Day for 5 straight days - hence the need for 22 valentines.  I thought back (wayyyyyy back) to my experiences as a child with classroom Valentine's Day parties.  (Look at that... a flashback within a flashback!  It's getting a little "Inception-y" in here).  Since I was not in daycare as a child, my only experience to draw from was elementary school.  I remembered decorating a bag in art class, hanging it on the front of my desk and walking around dropping store-bought, perforated valentine cards into everyone's bags... followed by the most important part -- taking the bag home and over-analyzing the message on the front of the card from Billy Turner to see if there was some sort of romantic intent in the selection he chose for me (He-Man... not so romantic).  So in anticipation of this very exciting week, I went to Target and bought a box of valentines from the VERY picked-over selection in the valentine aisle.  I wrote Maya's name on the back of each one, chucked them into an envelope and put them in her school bag.  At the end of the week, Maya brought her bag of valentines home.  I took a look (curious to see if she got a love note from the very dreamy Jake Shafer), expecting to see a whole pile of store-bought Hello Kitty and Veggie Tales valentines... Instead, what I pulled out of the bag left me speechless.  There were intricate homemade cards, bags of candy, and Martha Stewart-esque masterpieces.  Even those moms who sent perforated store-bought valentines at least had the wherewithal to tape a sucker or a piece of candy to the card.  My first (and only) thought was: "Man, I've gotta step up my game next year."  


Moral of the story: Valentines Day in the toddler world is for Moms.  Not for kids.  Lesson learned!


This year, I decided to embrace my growing obsession with crafts (ok, my growing obsession with Pinterest) and make my own valentines.  Wait a minute... Did I say my own valentines?  Clearly I meant Maya's valentines.

I have been wanting to pretend to be a craft blogger (a girl can dream), so this seemed like a great time to kill two birds (owls?) with one stone.  I have a weird thing for owls right now (and really, who doesn't?), so I searched the frighteningly large world of Pinterest for some owl ideas.  I found this as my inspiration:

I almost hate to post this picture,
since this lady puts my craft
ability to SHAME...

Now that you know WAY more about this story than you ever cared to, here's how I made our little owl friends...

1. Buy some card stock or scrapbook paper so you can cut out a billion tiny circles for the feathers.  Or if you're me, take a trip over to your local home improvement store, pretend to be considering a complete interior remodel of your home, and take LOTS of free paint samples.  Voila!  Free paper.  Done and done.

2. Borrow a circle cutter from a crafty friend (in this case, Jena... this girl is like my craft fairy godmother).  Cut an obscene number of circles (probably about 3/4 inch - I can't be bothered to measure...).  I realized I would need 15 "feathers" for each owl, so I needed to cut 270 circles.  Thankfully this circle cutter machine of Jena's cut several sheets at once, so this really didn't take more than 30 minutes of my life.  Maya was very intrigued by this process ("Mom, why are you cutting circles?" "Mom, are you still cutting circles?" "Mom, are you cutting more circles?"  Two-year-olds: a never-ending source of questions).  So here is what I was left with:

Pay no attention to the paint-related messages
on the back of each circle... I didn't really
think about that part when I was shoving
paint samples into my purse...

3. Cut out 36 black circles of the same size for the pupil of the owl's eye.  Then cut out 36 white circles one size larger for the rest of the eye.  Note to self: If you're going to steal help yourself to free paint samples, make sure you grab all the same shade of white.  I failed to do this, so I had to do a lot of "eye-matching" later in the process to be sure I didn't have one "winter white" eye and another "ecru" eye.  Live and learn... I bought some small rhinestone stickers to use as the knowing gleam in the wise owl's eyes.  Once all the circles were cut, I assembled the eyes.

Owl eyes, they're watching you.  Owl eyyyyyyyyes...

4. Cut out 18 hearts and 18 triangles to use for beaks and feet:

Excuse the obnoxious glare
in this photo...

5. I searched the Interweb for an owl pattern to use for the shape of the body.  I found a PDF of an owl pillow pattern, so I just used the body from that pattern as my outline.  I bought some colored card stock from Mecca Hobby Lobby (50% off - SCORE!!) and cut out the body of the owls.  Doesn't look too hard, does it?  Some people could probably freehand that shape.  I am not one of those people.

6. Mistake #2 from my circle-cutting adventure... As you can see above, I paid absolutely no mind whatsoever to keeping like colors together, so I had to spend some time sorting all the colors back out.  I knew I wanted there to be a variance of colors on each owl, but I wanted them to be in the same color family.  Side note: Some people might find this process to be super tedious.  However, my compulsive nature lends itself well to sorting activities, so I was in OCD Heaven.  Once I sorted the circles into color families, I divided them out onto each owl body.

This makes me want some Skittles really bad.
If you know what I'm talking about, we've been
friends for too long... (ahem, Rachel)

7. From there, I glued on the feet, feathers, beak, and eyes, and ended up with this:

8. Once they were dry, I flipped them over, wrote a note on the back with a gold paint pen, and called it a day!

Bonus: I bought some sparkly scrapbook paper while I was at Hobby Lobby ( I am drawn to sparkly things, even when I have absolutely no use for them).  I had a few extra circles, and a few extra (possibly mismatched) eyes, so I made a few extra fancy owls for Maya to give to the grandparents for Valentine's Day.  These ended up being my favorite :)

The verdict is still out on the owls... We'll see how they stack up against all the "Daycare Martha Stewart Moms'" valentines when Maya's valentine bag comes home on Friday.  One thing is for sure: if I pull out a perforated, store-bought, candy-less valentine, I will probably invite that mom to get some coffee, since certainly we are soul mates.

Happy Valentines Day!

What I Heard...

"You tell me..."
This is Maya's new alternative to "I don't know."  Recent example as we drove home the other day and went through an intersection:
Maya: "Green means go.  Red means stop."
Me: "Yeah, but what does yellow mean?"
Maya: (thinking.....) "You tell me!" 

(Source: openclipart.org)

 


"I got the angry birds.  I can't beat it and it's making me angry.  Do you have any hints on how to beat it?"
- Chad's mom, to Chad via text last week after his parents upgraded from Blackberry to iPhone.  I love when our parents (attempt to) embrace new technology.  If you know Chad's mom personally, this is much funnier than if you don't.  Picturing a 4'10" Filipino woman getting mad about Angry Birds makes me giggle...

(Source: softonic.com)

"Maya, remember how my friend Holli had a baby in her belly?"
"Yeah."
"Guess what!  Her baby came out!"
"I used to be in your belly.  But I'm too big to fit now."
Logic prevails with this kid...

Baby Cohen... so sweet :)
(Courtesy of Holli Ford)

Maya has been sick for the past week or so, and it all came to a head yesterday -- with green mucous coming out of her eyes (gross, I know).  Chad worked from home today and sent me a text describing this little scene... Apparently she was sitting on the couch, thrust her cup up in the air and shouted to Chad, who was sitting at the kitchen table:
"Dad! I need more milk right now so I can get better!!" 
Clearly she is starting to feel better (and taking advantage of the opportunity to master her manipulation skills).

This is obviously not Maya,
but this picture cracks me up...
(source: busymommymedia.com)

 


Stay tuned for next time, where I post some pictures of the (completely over-ambitious) Valentines I made for Maya's classmates...