Weekend Ideas: DIY Valentines

So. It’s the weekend before Valentine’s Day. And Harry and I will be hanging out, making Valentines. And playing Skylanders. As we’ve already established, I dig these little projects…even though I’m totally not crafty, nor do I have actual design skills. Thank God for the Internet. Here are my top five favorite cool ideas this year.

From Jacolyn Murphy. So clever.

Superhero blowpops from Zakka Life.

Heart crayons! From A Sprinkle of This and a Dash of That.

And this looks the most appetizing to me. Valentines Confetti from Nest of Posies

And my all-time favorite that I want to make every year, but never do. You’re the Bomb Rolo candy Valentines from Make It Do.

But Harry wants to make chocolate covered bacon and give that out. We all know who wins these things. (Appropriately, the one with the actual Valentines party.)

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In Other News and In Case You Missed It This Week….

1. Lisa Belkin at the Huffington Post wrote this thoughtful piece about doing your child’s homework. And she used me as her primary example. Oh dear. Thankfully she didn’t present me as too completely insane.

2. This crazy guy shot his daughter’s laptop. I saw this video yesterday afternoon, and it had about 10K views. Less than 24 hours later, it had almost 2 million.  (Lisa Belkin wrote a good piece about this too.) But this whole thing (and mainly, the way people reacted to it) made me think that there’s a waay bigger issue here. We’re the first generation to raise children on the Internet. What I mean is, I didn’t have Internet until after college…and I have a 6 year old. I have no parental example about how to deal with the Internet at all. We didn’t even have our own phone lines back when I was in high school. Clearly, there are some major control (or out of control) issues here…and we’re forging the way on how to handle this (or not). We don’t know what to do (or what we’re doing)…and we are a generation of parents who are at-the-core-of-things scared. That’s my take. But I just have a Kindergartener, what do I know? It’s never occurred to me to shoot anything of his, so far. I’ll keep you posted.

3. These million moms, or a few moms anyway, started hassling Ellen. And said that all traditional people agreed with them. I don’t know what traditional is anymore, really. But it seemed like bullying to me. I wrote about it all over on Pushing Refresh. Other people are doing a buy-in to support the people that are supporting her. You can join in that too. (I’m going to do this on Sunday.)

4. Mom 2.0 Summit announced its first group of speakers. And they’re incredible.

5. I found a ton of Valentines dresses I want at Meat Market Vintage.

Happy Weekend!

5 Responses to Weekend Ideas: DIY Valentines

1. Pingback: High Five for the Weekend! (Violens, The Virgins, Santigold, Young and the Giant, and Hospitality) | Blog con Queso

2. Brigid says:

   February 10, 2012 at 1:37 pm

   I started tearing up at the end of Ellen’s video when she rattled off the “traditional values” that she stood for. Thanks so much for pointing us toward the video.
3. Helen Jane says:

   February 10, 2012 at 3:01 pm

   LOVE the bomb valentines.
   And you’re only mildly insane.
   (In the best possible way.)

4. Pingback: “Love is a battlefield” More boy valentines

5. V says:

   February 10, 2012 at 8:25 pm

   I wanted to weigh in on #2, and I’m afraid I’m gonna end up being very long winded. Sorry in advance. I’m not a parent (although I am old enough to have a child Harry’s age, it’s just not my path right now), but I am an adult who actually was raised on the internet. My dad was a super early adopter. He thought the internet was neat, so he shared it with his kids. I cannot remember a time in my life when we didn’t have internet at home. His decision to get us online early has had a great deal of positive impact on my life to the point where I’m a serious evangelist for parents exposing their children to the internet.

   While the internet has certainly changed significantly since dad first attached a modem to our Commodore, I think I can say with some authority that good parenting is good parenting with or without the internet. I think the things that good parents are apt to do (balancing supervision with freedom, allowing children to explore their interests, modeling appropriate behaviour) are all things that translate well to the internet experience. The things that my father did in regards to our internet use stand out the me as a model for good online parenting. I’ll mention them, because I’m passionate about it (and proud of my dad for doing it), but I really think that good parents will come to these things naturally (and that I’ll almost certainly come off as a pedant for listing them).

   - Go online /with/ your kids when they’re young so that you can teach them how you expect them to behave when you give them more freedom later.

   - Allow/force your children to explore their interests and foster their creativity on AND off of the computer. By way of example, my younger brother got interested in programming very young. My dad certainly let him muck around with writing programs and reading about different program languages on online forums, but he also helped/made my brother learn about them offline as well. He checked out library books and he tracked down local programmers who were willing to let a very young boy watch them work. My brother gained a lot from those experiences. He’s a programmer with Google now (still in his 20s, and he makes a larger salary now than I will probably make in my entire life). I don’t think he would have gotten as far had he not been made to go offline periodically. I believe that mixing online and offline exposure to content is valuable regardless of your child’s interest. The internet offers opportunities that aren’t available in other media, but it doesn’t offer every opportunity.

   - Model appropriate internet usage by 1.) showing your children /how/ to use it (I taught for a while, everyone is always pushing teachers to let kids use computers in class, but kids don’t get anything useful out of computers unless they have adults who can show them how. Just like reading – it’s one thing to be able to decipher the words, but it’s another thing entirely to understand the story. Comprehension has to be modeled) and 2.) showing them /when/ to use it (if you behave like an internet addict, your child will too).

   - Teach your child about the importance of privacy. This one is the kicker to me. I read an article once by a woman who mentioned that one thing she was scared of for her kids is that, with things like social networking, foolish teenage mistakes can be irreversible. It’s one thing if you make a poor decision when you’re 15. It’s a whole different thing when that poor decision gets posted on facebook or becomes a viral youtube video. Since my dad was new to the internet at the same time he was teaching us about it, he had ample opportunity to demonstrate good privacy behaviour. He talked with us about the importance of not sharing certain things online. He also modeled good habits for meeting online only friends in person for the first time (in a public place, make sure someone knows where you are, etc). I played online roleplaying games as a teenage girl back when they were text based, involved more actual roleplaying, and (some things never change)were populated almost entirely by men. You can imagine that knowing the importance of not sharing certain information online and setting boundaries about meeting online friends in person were very valuable skills for me.

   I really and truly believe 1.) that it is vital for kids today to be taught how to use computers and the internet at a young age (we teach kids to read because it’s both enjoyable and an invaluable life skill, and I’d say that the internet is starting to fall in that same category) 2.) that good parents are good parents with or without the internet.

   To me, the laptop shooting dad is just another example of the kind of parents who fall back on embarrassing or harshly punishing their kids in public because they failed to demonstrate to those kids what type of behaviour they expect. If you don’t teach your kid not to be a jerk online, they’re going to be a jerk online. Just like if you never teach your kid good table manners, you’ll never be able to take them out to a restaurant without risking embarrassment.