How to Prove You Love Them

If anyone needed proof that I love my boys, I would point to this:

I did a craft project for them. Voluntarily.

I am not a crafty woman. In fact, when the boys were in grade school they had a secret academic advantage in that I could "help" them with their homework projects in such a way that a teacher would never suspect that a grown-up woman had put together that mess of globby paste and saw-toothed cut edges. My shameful secret was that I was doing my very best.

Boys#1 and #2 had been in their apartment for several weeks when I asked if they liked it. It's great, Two told me, but really sterile. Undecorated. Did I have any suggestions?

Oh, my gosh! They need help decorating! My mind fast-forwarded through the decades I have spent watching "Design on a Dime." Yeah, I said nonchalantly, I cold probably come up with something.

Now, after spending the past two weeks on the project, it is finally in place in their apartment. In case you ever want to duplicate my work (HGTV? Are you out there?), here are the steps involved:

1. Make sure your children have decent cameras when they spend their semesters abroad, and that they choose interesting places to study. Hong Kong and London come to mind.

2. Every time they Skype you, whine about how you sure wish you could see what they were doing, until they sign off with the overseas equivalent of "I think I hear the doorbell ringing." Eventually, just to make you back off, they will upload their albums to Snapfish.

3. Years later, scroll through their old Snapfish albums. Do not envy their Eiffel Tower climbing and panda viewing, or call them to say "Man, I'd sure like to go to Europe or Asia some day. Or ANYWHERE besides central Texas."

4. Make Snapfish posters out of their some of their best shots. Pat yourself on the back because even though you can't shoot a grip-and-grin without cutting off either the grip or the grin, their photographic genius obviously comes from you.

5. Buy some cheap poster frames. Flip over the stock photo that comes with the frame and spray-paint the blank side brick red. Scrub your toes.

6. Cut out a poster-board template so that you will exactly center the photos in the red "matte" you have so economically made.

7. Spray craft glue on the photos, and your thumb, and realize that Elmer's is not kidding when it says it will stick to anything, and make anything stick to everything else whether that was your intention or not.

8. Realize that in spite of the template you have "centered" the photos crooked and that synapses in Husband's brain will now explode every time he tries to look at them.

9. Hang the posters above the $5 couch and realize that this display, cheap as it was, cost 15 times as much as the couch.

10. Say to your children, "Hey, doesn't that look great?" They will respond, "Yeah, looks fine, Mom." Congratulate yourself, that you have not raised children who are overly emotional. It is obvious that internally they are speechless with admiration for your artistry.

 11. When you blog about the project, do not use the picture you took of the wall display that showed Boy#2 flaked out on the couch and not looking so pretty, but showed the wall display much more beautifully than this picture does.

Then let them take you out to lunch. That's how you prove you love them.