Cupid Week Summary

One thing that I absolutely love about motherhood is seeking out and creating meaningful family traditions. I love caroling with our family and friends at Christmas, passing our bowl of rocks around during Thanksgiving, attending Fourth of July parades, and driving around while Cameron and the kids dash in and out of the van to heart attack a few local widows and beloved neighbors in February. I love all of the traditions that surround General Conference weekends at our house. And last week when Abby asked when we were going to have our Passover dinner that we have the week of Easter, I had to smile. Traditions are fun to anticipate and wonderful to enjoy. Hopefully as the years pass our children will pick up a few things that we deliberately look to instill like faith, gratitude, service, patriotism, and love.

So last fall when I saw a post on Power of Moms that mentioned one family's Cupid Week tradition, I made a mental note. Any tradition that teaches my children to perform acts of kindness for each other sounds like a winner to me. The basic idea is to assign your children to each other as secret pals, then encourage them to give small treats and do small kindnesses for each other throughout the week. Of course, our children are young, so this year our rendition of Cupid Week was fairly basic and will definitely need some future alterations. For starters, in future years I will hold a little planning session with all the local germs to make sure two-thirds of my kids aren't sick the week of Valentine's. But also, this year Grace was too young to really participate, so Jake and Abby were assigned to each other and there wasn't much secrecy about that. Small though our numbers were, I think they still had fun.

I admittedly didn't love waiting in the grocery store aisles with Jake and Abby individually while they chose surprises for each other. But I did love talking to them about thoughtful things they could do for each other, listening to their ideas for service, and watching schemes unfold. Abby did one of Jake's jobs for him one day and surprised him with treats when he came home from school another day. Jake spent a few days listlessly lying on the couch...but before all that he made a cute little trail of M&Ms for Abby that led to a little plate of conversation hearts.

Jake decided to keep things sanitary by putting each M&M in its own little plate or bowl

If you can't actually see the M&Ms in those bowls, just trust me. They were in there. 

                                   
Cupid Week also inspired me to do a few extra nice things for Cameron throughout the week. I love surprises.

We don't drink a lot of soda, but Cameron sure loves an occasional mug of root beer when we have it.

If you are looking for a fun family Valentine's Day tradition, we definitely recommend Cupid Week.