Is this what rock bottom looks like? Hunched over in my driver’s seat parked at a 7-11, frantically portioning out 5 M&Ms onto squares of Saran Wrap I had hacked from the roll (Have you ever tried to cut Saran Wrap into even squares? Trust me, you’ll only do it once, from the depths of desperation.), twisting the wrap into a pouch then scotch-taping it to a tiny, cheap Paw Patrol valentine.

If it’s not rock bottom it’s the closest I’ve gotten so far.

We got a list of 26 kids’ names to provide valentines for the pre-school’s Valentine’s Day party. No worries! I purchased a cheap box of Paw Patrol insta-valentines (plus fake tattoos, because that’s how we roll—providing toddlers with the gateway to an ink addiction) WEEKS ago. I am on TOP of this game.

I even got Captain in on the act. While I was away for the day before V-Day, he coached Toby through signing each one. The night before V-Day, I packed up my assigned school party provisions donation (veggies. Toby swore no one would eat the celery, but damn it, celery was in the party platter of pre-cut veggies and as such it would for sure be included in my ‘why yes, I did carefully chop and slice all these veggies’ re-packaging effort into Tupperware.).

I wrote each child’s name on a valentine and tucked a fake tattoo into it. I even went so far as to put each room’s group into a separate ziploc bag with the class name on it.

BOOM, mother of the year. I was pretty proud of myself.

Then. Then I remembered that last year, I sent just valentines. And Toby came home with elaborate candy offerings from each of his classmates. I even remember the plaintive Facebook post I made about it.

Damn it. Was I going to make my kid THAT kid—the one who didn’t attach a lollipop to his valentine—two years in a row? My peer-pressure/mom-guilt addled brain decided at 11:30 p.m. that I. Would. Not.

And so began the process of conjuring up 26 individual servings of candy in the middle of the night. Yeah, we’re not the kind of family that keeps handfuls of individual serving candies around. In desperation, I decided to cannibalize the box of Valentine’s M&Ms that Toby’s grandmother had sent him. I did the math of serving size x servings per box and decided that 5 M&Ms per kid would suffice. (Hint, don’t believe the box’s M&M count.).

About 15 tiny hand-made Saran-Wrap baggies of 5 M&Ms each into the process (I experimented with sandwich bags. Do you know how pathetic a serving of 5 M&Ms looks in a sandwich bag?), I realized I wasn’t going to hit my quota. Not even if I bumped my serving down to 4 for all of the Bunny Rabbit class. I can now say that I’ve cursed the M&M gods.

And so, my friends, THIS is how I found myself buying an emergency bag of M&Ms at 7:30 a.m. on Valentine’s Day, then breaking a dewey sweat as I nestled 5 M&Ms each into their Saran Wrap purses in the 7-11 parking lot. I only had to fill 9 that morning, but with the tiny voice in the back seat questioning my sanity, it felt like an eternity of futility.

And yes, Toby came home with a box OVERFLOWING with valentines attached to lovely individual serving boxes of conversation hearts, Swedish fish, lollipops, and more. There was even a hand-lettered card with a Matchbox boat attached with a nice ribbon.

All this sent home in a highly crafted box festooned with decorations. Said box and decorations provided by a FAR more crafty mother who actually came INTO SCHOOL to supervise this crafting by 3-year-olds. Guess what, I wasn’t that mother.

I can only imagine the other parents pillaging the kids’ loot for a post-bedtime snack and coming across my 7-11-to-table, artisan crafted, mom-guilt sealed M&M Saran Wrap pouch with less than a handful of M&Ms inside. My sincere hope is that they had a sense of humor. Or, at the very least, a sense of pity.