Hearts of rage



The hearts of rage (they look
innocuous, don't they?)
Download them here to avoid
having the rage yourself

As a Dubliner, I feel sort of proprietorial about St. Valentine's Day, though I have never been to see his remains in the city church in which they rest. I also like seeing people smiling carrying flowers and I think telling people you love them is a good thing. Sure, it's all marketing and hype and prescribed affection if you want to see it that way but, it you want to partake, I will be happy to support your efforts. You can even send me some flowers while you're at it and I'll be grateful, thrilled and surprised.

However, Z2 is two and a half. When asked if X or Q or R is his friend, he will respond either "He doesn't hit me" or "He can talk, but he can't sing songs".  His concept of friendship and love is not yet fully developed. Although he is an affectionate little fellow, I don't think he has any particular want or need to show his pre-schooler colleagues his affection by way of a heart-embellished card or pencil or sweetie. His daycare is brilliant and I generally can't fault them. However, my heart sank when  I saw a list of all the children and teachers in the room taped to his cubbyhole. There was a paragraph explaining that bringing in Valentine's tokens - shop-bought or homemade - was not compulsory but the children would be having an activity involving distributing Valentine's tokens to each other. This letter is what brought on the hearts of rage. The letter went up on the Monday, with Valentine's Day being Thursday, so I didn't even have a weekend to prepare.

In fact, I had already been stewing and pondering over a craft for Z1 to do to bring in to her friends. I had opted out last year, our first February in Canada, not knowing she would come home laden with sweeties and pencils and stickers. I rolled my eyes a bit and resolved to sort her out with something to bring in this year but hadn't really got a concrete idea by the 11th of February. I wanted something that she could mostly do herself but knew she would get bored before she had written her own name, let alone any further message, on a token for each of her classmates.

And so, with this double pressure, from memories of last year and the letter from the pre-school room, I used Word to make the hearts of rage. The rage was caused by various cutting and pasting, text placement and font size complications. The plan was to bring them home, have the Zeds paint them in pink, red and glitter and then glue the paper to some card, cut them out on squares and possibly, if I had the energy, personalise the ones for Z2's colleagues given they were having a distribution activity. Sigh. Even worse, despite supposedly  having become one of those people, I didn't have any saved cereal boxes for backing the hearts. The idea grew into attaching bits of paper to Z1's tokens to make them into very useful bookmarks instead of pretty useless bits of card just beautiful tokens of affection.

Valentine's bookmark
from Z1

Glittery Valentine's hearts on
squares from Z2

Considering the forced march feel of this activity from my point of view, it was actually rather nice. Z2 more or less painted one sheet before wandering off to do something else (I haven't yet discovered any pink, glittery handprints) and Z1 zealously coated her two pages in glitter glue and paint. That was Tuesday evening. I cooked a creamy mild curry dish while this took place before finishing off Z2's other sheet. Z1 was set to work on Wednesday after school attaching pieces of stiff paper to her squares (while I made homemade burgers and cooked up some sweetcorn) and the finished products are certainly passable. I cut Z2's sheets into squares and decided it would be MUCH easier for the staff if I didn't write names on each heart so they could be distributed randomly.