(This is a crazy-long post. It’s not mushy, but it is inclusive. Which in this case just means long.)

Dear Abigail, Owen, Audrey, and Sadie,

Sometimes I think Valentine’s Day is more fun to celebrate with kids than with grown-up people.

Drinking tea and doing crafts. What’s not to love?

There’s the plotting and planning: what to make? where to hide it once it’s made? and how to put your grand vision down onto a folded half-sheet of paper?  There’s the week-long frenzy of crafting (scissors! colored paper! needles and thread! glue! coloredpencils-markers-crayons-watercolors-pastels!) to produce, in the end, one perfect valentine apiece. And all of this makes you happy, which makes me happy, too.

Embroidering the truth. Or the valentines.

But I know that what you’d like, more than this note from me, more than a box of chocolates that I’d only let you eat one of at a time (unless you’re Audrey or Sadie, in which case: none), more than a bouquet of flowers (though you think those are pretty cool, especially if you get to find them and pick them yourself)—more than any of that, I know that what you’d like is for me to STOP WRITING THAT LETTER ALREADY MOM and come have more crafty fun with you. So I will. Because I love you.

Yes, I hold a monster book in my lap while doing needlework. Doesn’t everybody?

Love,
The Mom

Dear Sadie especially,

I know you won’t remember this when you’re bigger, so I’m going to write it down. In our family, we like to sing songs but make up our own words to them. (That part you’ll remember when you’re older. Because we’re not likely to have stopped by then. In fact, by then, we’ll probably be driving you crazy with it.) This week, you’ve started doing it, too. I don’t know if you’re inventing lyrics or just repeating what you think we mean, but either way, I like it.

You’ve sung repeatedly that you are my sunshine (“I am your sunshine, your little sunshine, and we are happy, every day”), and yesterday you sang this song from Sesame Street:

But instead of “Me and My Llama,” you sang “Me and my mama, stay in our pajamas, yes it’s just my mama and me.”

I can’t imagine a better valentine.

I love you.

Mama

Dear New Baby-to-be,

We are going to have so much fun together. I hope you like scissors and paste and crayons, because I guarantee your sisters and brother will try to get you to make your own valentines next year. Even if you’re not yet crawling. Don’t worry, it’s going to be awesome. Or at least crayon-y.

Love,
The woman on the other side of the belly

Dear Dane,

You make life more fun. Even the parts of life where the floor is covered with eight thousand tiny bits of cut-up construction paper and six thousand tiny hole-punched bits of computer paper and a thousand tiny scraps of thread and untold amounts of glitter and also one glue smear that you just stepped in. Even those parts. (Especially those parts!) More fun. Because you’re there.

I love you. And I love how you wield that broom to rid the world—or at least the floor under the kitchen table—of leftover valentine-i-ness. You rock.

Love,
Me

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Jen and Sarah are collecting lovely love notes over at Momalom.
Check them out and add your own.