My maternity leave is drawing to an end, and I am both dreading and anticipating returning to work, if that makes any sense. There are things I’m really looking forward to: being around other adults, working on projects, and having an ongoing reason to get dressed before noon a few days a week. But of course I’ll miss being around the kids, especially since Dylan has officially entered the Adorable Cooing Phase of babyhood.

At any rate, when I get back to work at the start of May I’ll need to update some of the family photos I’ve got in my office. I mean, now there’s a whole new child to proudly display. Plus, I’d like to spruce things up in general — my workplace had just moved to a new building before I went on leave, so my office is kind of drab since I hadn’t bothered to personalize it much before leaving it empty for twelve weeks.

Do you have any cool ideas for spiffing up a workspace, and including items that remind you of your family? I’d love to hear them! Here are a few things I’ve been looking at:

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I am not exactly a professional photographer over here. In fact, I don’t know what half the buttons on my camera do, I can’t remember what an F-stop is, and the last time I used my tripod I caught my foot on it and sprawled flat on my living room floor.

But! I do love taking, editing, and sharing photos, and thanks to the tools I use, they don’t always suck. Unless they are of me (because my mouth is always hanging open or my eyes are pointing in two different directions or a fat roll has somehow snuck into the scene), or of my cat (because she always appears to be an amorphous black blob). I post most of my favorite images to Flickr, and one of these days I’m actually going to print some family photos and hang them in my house. REALLY I AM.

Anyway, my suggestions for turning out halfway decent photos without having a single clue about photography:

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You know what? I don’t like Valentine’s Day. It seems like there’s too much pressure to have some kind of uber-romantic, gooey day filled with expensive presents and chocolate, all for no particular reason. I mean, I’m not against holidays that advocate doing nice things for people for no particular reason (after all, as a godless heathen this pretty much describes Christmas for me), but there’s just something about the plethora of hearts and cards and ugly cheap jewelry that takes all of the fun out of it.

Since our household is still vibrating from the impact of having a newborn catapulted into it, I declared this year a collective Free Pass on Valentine’s Day participation. No presents, no flowers, no panicky last-minute shopping. However, as I was still languishing in bed yesterday morning feeding the baby, my husband sent our toddler racing into the bedroom to shout “HAPPY BALENTINE DAY MOMMY!” before thrusting a card in my hand. It featured some sweet words from my husband, as well as a few helpful scribbles from Riley.

Well MELT MY COLD BLACK HEART WHY DON’T YOU.

It got me thinking about a subject that’s perplexed me before: what do you do with your kid’s artistic creations, especially the ones you might actually want to hang onto? In honor of the more tolerable aspects of Valentine’s Day — specifically, the part where your children (or someone else on Behalf of the Children) do something cute for you — I’ve collected a few cool ideas for making keepsakes from such things:

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I have a love/hate relationship with video cameras. On the one hand, it’s so great to have little video snippets of your kids as they’re growing up, because they grow up so freaking FAST, and there’s nothing quite like video. Photos are awesome, but video gets you right back in the moment, as you sit hunched over the video player sobbing to yourself and humming “Sunrise, Sunset” like a big sappy WUSS.

On the other hand, I think a video camera is very difficult to deal with in terms of finding the right balance between “capturing the moment” and “being an OCD psycho and whipping out the camera every time they do something cute”. I can personally attest to going overboard at one point and ending up with approximately 295739295 digital files of Riley engaged in such scintillating activities as breathing.

There’s also the question of what to do with your video files once you’ve got them on the camera. In my case, I have a super-neat little JVC digital camcorder that unfortunately records in a video format my Mac doesn’t recognize — so in order to download clips, I first have to run them through a program that re-interprets the data and barfs it back out in a format I can import into whatever editing app I’m using. Which is way too time consuming and definitely keeps me from doing as much with video as I’d like to, but that’s my personal problem, presumably your camera isn’t so fussy.

So! Assuming you capture video on occasion, what do you do with it? Here’s what I tend to do:

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