My daughter’s valentine bag came home full and looking like an advertisement for Pinterest. 

There were no fewer than four bookmark projects involving paint chips, at least three or clever plays on words like “crayon” and “sucker” (with appropriate items attached) and of course, the requisite doilies taped/stapled/glued together.

Facebook was even worse – everyone rushing to display what “my kid did” for Valentine’s Day (perhaps with a TINY bit of help from mum).

Looking at that bag, I flashed back to a Valentine’s FB post by a friend (private and I can’t link, unfortunately). It was a story written years ago by her grandfather several years ago, a humorous piece about why he hated Valentine’s Day because when he was growing up, students had all week to drop “mail” into other student’s boxes, with no requirement that everyone receive a valentine from everyone else. (The horror! The inequity!) Apparently, in Depression-era rural Pennsylvania, the best Valentines were the precious, “store bought” variety.

Clearly, we have come full circle. 

I confess, I have not signed up for Pinterest yet. I know it is inevitable, but I fear and dread it. One reason – the reason I keep articulating – is that Pinterest has the promise of being even more time-wastey than Facebook, and I do not have room for another Facebook in my life, thankyouverymuch. The second, more shameful reason, is that I am just plain annoyed about it. Pinterest is trying to ruin my life.

 Let’s be honest, people. The single strength I bring to this whole mommying rodeo is that I have a lot of cute ideas. I don’t always have time to execute them, and I get a LOT of help when I do from Marvelous Michele, but I do really enjoy trying to come up with cute things to do. But with Pinterest, you don’t need ideas, just a computer and time.

Arg. My one parenting strength has been obsoleted (is that a word?) by social media.

And for now, I am taking a perverse pleasure in NOT using Pinterest for my ideas. Why? As near as I can tell, because I am stupid that way.

Rant over. I will return you to your regularly scheduled blog.  Or you can go craft or something. I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of “aggravated rainbow” craft with paintchips that we can make off of Pinterest.