Valentine's Day Prep

I was so excited this year to prep for Valentine's Day.  Usually, I'm working on getting 20+ Valentine's ready for my classroom along with assessments, report cards and prepping for conferences.   While I enjoyed getting Valentine's for my class and making them something special, it was also a very stressful time of year for me.  

I have been waiting FOREVER to be able to make the cute projects I've saved for a while years, to do with my own children.  Making them with your students is fun, but doing them with your own child is AMAZING!  This year, I found a very cute idea on Pinterest for our family Valentines.  Usually it was all I could do to just get my classroom kids taken care of, but this year I got to make the sweetest Valentines for our family.  

The best part was watching Jack experience paint for the first time.  He wasn't so sure at first, but as soon as the paintbrush started tickling his little hand, we couldn't get the smile off of his face!  We made some a lot of hand prints, and most of them came out great.   Getting Jack to actually open his hand long enough was a challenge, but Joe and I did a good job of tag teaming without getting paint on ourselves.  When we were done with the hand prints, (the reason why we were doing the project) we set Jack free with the paint brush to see what he would do.  He painted on the paper pretty well, and got the paint to stay mostly on the paper.  He did try to eat it a couple of times and that's when we knew the project was over!  (Daddy had a little fun painting Jack as well, notice his forehead and his chest!)  He had a bath right after we were done and the bath water turned pink!  It was so funny, so we had to take 2 baths to clean him up.  Totally worth it!  (I also used a teacher trick of mine and mixed the paint with soap before we started so it made an easier clean up!)

Caught RED Handed

Oh, so this is a paintbrush!

I can do this...

Now I think I'll taste it...

Jack's first painting (11 months) 2-4-12

Finished product--front

finished product--open hand "Blowing lots of KISSES your way!"

Not sure why that last picture wouldn't rotate, tried to fix it several times.  Oh well, you get the idea.  Our first painting project was a great success, and I can't wait to do more projects with Jack as he gets bigger!