Valentine's Day and Photography Challenge Day #14 - Eyes

This one is my photo for Day #14:

This was Scott's Valentine's Day box.  (Thank you Pinterest.)  I did not know about this whole valentines box at school thing until Claire got to the 1st grade.  (Bless her Kindergarten teacher and her current 2nd grade teacher for just having them make containers IN CLASS.) 

I can't say I love this tradition.  Too much pressure. You find out whether your kid needs to make one with a week's notice.  And then you have to create something fabulous so that your child will LOVE it and won't feel jealous of all the other kids' boxes.  And you find yourself competing with parents who make their children life size silver robots and cupcakes the size of a laundry basket (I am NOT exaggerating).

I don't want to play.  Let's grab whatever shoebox we have around and slap some stickers on it, I say.  But I tried to be fun this year for Scott because this idea wasn't too complex.  Still a shoe box, just paint and hot glue instead of stickers.

Yah, so um, I forgot the part where letting him do it involved handing him bright green paint and a paint brush.  I just don't DO paint with my kids.  It gives me a brain aneurism just thinking about it. I wish I was more fun and relaxed.  I keep trying to pretend that I'm that fun mom who lets her kids paint.  It's not working.

And then in the end, Scott was home sick with a fever on Valentine's Day anyway.  Oh well.  At least his fun box was there to receive his valentines for him.

In other Valentine's Day related events:

In fit of ambition, I decided to do handmade valentines with the kids this year.  I used this idea I saw a couple years back.  I thought it would be fairly easy and the kids could do most of it.  I always get these delusional visions of doing fun crafts WITH them and all of us actually enjoying ourselves. 

Turns out my kids can't reliably wield a stapler.  So I did all of the stapling and most of the filling with Valentine's colored M&M's.  But they did do all the cutting, addressing, signing, and some of the filling.  I guess that's not too bad.

Scott's weren't too difficult because he agreed to print his on various colored papers:

Claire, however, insisted on printing hers out on white and coloring them all:

I tried to warn her that it would be A LOT of work.  She was making 20 valentines.  But she was determined.  And surprise, surprise, someone got really sick of coloring them after about four. 

I wish I could say that I refrained from saying, "I told you so."  I also wish I could say that I refrained from threatening and/or yelling in order to get her to finish them up.

But everything got done in plenty of time and on the day, Claire got to go to school sporting heart hair:

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  Posts may or may not be daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC