“Mommy, February is Love Month!” I looked at my eight year old’s sparkling eyes directed at me waiting for an equally enthusiastic reply. I couldn’t think of any reason why we couldn’t celebrate all month long, so Love Month it was.
With my watchful apprentice at hand, I cut out small pink and red hearts out of construction paper. She continued snipping and creating hearts for her dolls while I reached for my Bible and began searching for verses that had the word, “love” in them.
Starting with John 3:16, I wrote a verse on each heart, folded the paper and placed it in a red jar on the large oak table we used for dining, homeschool, and every creative endeavor in our household. I wrote favorites from the Psalms (“I love the Lord, for he heard my voice!” and 1 John (“We love because he first loved us.”) and before I knew it, 28 hearts filled the jar.
I affixed my daughter’s paper hearts to a piece of construction paper and placed the jar on top. She ran to add a few stones she had decorated with words such as “love” and “joy” and “peace.” Our centerpiece was complete. We were ready for Love Month.
For whatever reason, February is often a challenge, especially as a homeschool family. The celebrations of fall and winter are long gone, and we’ve settled into the cold, dark days of winter. Though we know Spring is around the corner, it’s hard to tell. February is notoriously the coldest and the most-likely-to-get-snow month on the calendar for us.
We love celebrating Valentine’s Day as a family with a special meal and gifts for each other, but it’s just one day out of the month. With the advent of Love Month, we drew out the celebration to celebrate Jesus’ love for us for the full 28 days of February.
Now to be clear, the last thing I wanted to do was add yet another to-do item to my list. Instead, we simply read a verse each day from the jar and taped them along the bar that borders our dining room. I had originally wanted to tape them up high like a banner, but my daughter wanted to review the verses every day, and I wasn’t going to argue with that!
Admittedly, though my kiddo was the instigator with Love Month, I was even more inspired after reading Sally Clarkson’s The Life-Giving Home. She has a whole chapter on how her family celebrates February, which got the wheels in my brain ticking. Though the month is mostly gone, you can still celebrate (or bookmark this page for next year!) I’m going to share three ways we are making February our Love Month, and you KNOW they are going to have creativity all over them because I can’t help myself. 🙂
As I mentioned, to begin with, I cut out 28 paper hearts of varying sizes from pink and red construction paper. I then wrote verses (or parts of verses) from the Bible that had the word, “love” in them. You can also find many verses in the back of your Bible (in the concordance section.)
We also decided to purchase simple gifts for each other. We don’t do huge presents as a couple for Valentine’s Day, but we do like to get a little something.
This year ended up being a poetry and paint-by-number year. Don’t ask me why; it just happened that way. I had been eyeing a beautiful book of poetry for children that has a poem for every day of the year for a while. That was our family gift.
My husband bought me an amazing abstract paint-by-number peacock; I love that it is a canvas that I can immediately hang so I don’t have to worry about framing. (We’ve lived in two different places that has peacocks wandering around the premises—I’ll probably do a video or another post later to let you see how it turns out.) And I bought a kitten paint-by-number for our daughter since I knew she would want to join in. That kid has more creativity in her pinkie than I have in my whole body.
We discovered the beautiful poetry of Malcolm Guite this winter, so I bought my husband Guite’s latest offering on the Psalms of David. It is so lovely, and I knew my husband would love it. I’ll be using Guite’s poetry readings for Lent this year so we’ll be able to chat all things poetry in the coming weeks. I’m really looking forward to that.
A couple of days before Valentine’s Day, we made homemade cards for each other. These are so easy and satisfying. All you need is watercolor paper, white crayons (or a clear oil crayon), and vibrant watercolors. (These are the ones we used.)
We drew doodles, hearts and designs on our paper first and then painted water over the entire sheet of paper. We wanted the watercolors to really move and “bloom.” Before we started, I saturated the pink and purple watercolor paint in the pan so they would be nice and juicy.
We dipped our paintbrushes into the paint and swirled and painted over our paper. The crayon (or oil crayon) acts like a resist, so we could see our designs under the color. The vibrancy of the paint sang from the paper—I love watching the colors mix and move across the sheet.
The paintings were left to dry overnight on the counter, and in the morning, we cut out heart shapes. Large hearts, medium hearts, and small hearts were stacked on top of each other and affixed with glue dots. We wrote our love messages on the back of the large hearts and added them to our centerpiece on the dining room table. There were so many hearts even the dolls were given valentines. 🙂
This month has been such a precious break from what used to be the doldrums of winter. When I gave our kiddo one of her presents, she opened it with enthusiasm: “Oh, Mommy! This is what I’ve always yearned for!”
We will definitely be celebrating Love Month for many years to come.
I hope you have a lovely {and creative} day, friends!
