Happy Heart Day

They say that Valentine's Day is overrated, or a Hallmark Holiday, but I love any reason to turn an ordinary day into a celebration.  Especially with little ones in the house.  Jordis was dressing for the holiday a few days in advance.

I was pretty excited that my Valentine's treats for bible study turned out exactly like they looked in the picture.  That rarely happens.

I also got a box of chocolates from my secret sister.  Yum!

Jordis and Xander each brought home a ton of cards and goodies from their classmates.

We ended the day with breakfast for dinner (and a picture that for some reason keeps showing up sideways even though it's upright in my computer...grrrrrr).

Hope you had a fantastic Valentine's Day, too!

Valentine's Weekend

Yes, I realize that Valentine's Day is only on the 14th, but it fell on a Monday so we celebrated for two days since we had family time on Sunday. After playing in the snow the kids came in to warm up with some hot chocolate. They didn't know I had heart-shaped marshmallows for it, so they were pretty excited.

For dinner I decided to have a diner theme and serve chili cheese hot dogs (nitrite and nitrate free for those of you who know I try not to serve my kids processed meat), homemade french fries and red Crush in the bottles. My secret sister from church gave me some festive plates and napkins for the occasion so it made setting the table cute and easy, I just added my own red chargers and special touches.

Jason's uncle Roy and aunt Mona got us these soda glasses from our wedding registry years ago. I don't use them often because they're not practical for every day, but I love them and they come in handy for special times, so I'm really glad that we have them. I thought they would be perfect to serve french fries in for my diner theme, but I quickly realized it would take a LOT of fries to make them stick out of the top like I wanted and a) I wasn't cutting up any more potatoes and b) that's way too many fries, especially for the kids.

And it just wouldn't be a party without dessert, would it? I had a chocolate covered strawberry for everyone's place serving and then I had a dessert plate on the table.

I made Jason and the kids a card from a tutorial I saw online. It had pictures of us together from throughout the year and it folds up to look like a gift tag. They were really fun to make and all the supplies I already had, so they didn't cost me a dime.

I also used my supply stash to decorate some straws for our bottled pop. To my shock and excitement, the kids aren't big fans of red pop. Awesome, since they don't need to be drinking it anyway, but now I know they won't start asking for it now that I let them taste it.

Jordis gave up on the straw for some reason.

It was a fun evening together.

On Valentine's Day I started the kids off with some heart shaped waffles and we had some fun cookies for lunch. Xander said he was really excited to find his cookie in his lunch box. We also sent some treats for his teachers. They are pretzels shaped like letters covered with chocolate and red sugar, but you couldn't really tell by the time they were in the package.

That night, Jason and I got to go on a dinner date. My mom and step-dad gave us some money and babysat the kids for us. It was a great weekend!

Now we move on to Mardi Gras!

Happy Valentine's Day!

We've been very busy here celebrating Valentine's Day. We made cards....

....and read books. I loved the book on the left, it was darling.

I'm one of the party planners for Xander's class so Jordis and I attended his kindergarten party at school, too.

Poor Jordis felt so left out, even though she got to make the craft and have snack. You can tell by her face in all the pictures that she was longing for a bag of Valentine cards to open like Xander and the rest of his friends.

Here's Xander with his friends Madison and Brayden.

Today the kids got to open a few presents and they had movie night with Dad while I got to do some shopping by myself.

This is what Jason and I got for Valentine's Day. I never realized how poorly our other vacuum was working until we tried this one out today.

Next up: Mardi Gras! I've got lots of work to do in the next two days.

My computer's back!

I'm so excited to have my computer back from the shop, but now I have to try and condense what I was going to blog about so it's not so overwhelming. Jason was letting me use his computer but the blog program only lets you upload photos from a URL or from the computer you're on, and I didn't want to download things to his computer and then go back and delete them later. Too time consuming. So I took a little blog hiatus.

Let's see....I discovered the icicles hanging off the house the day after I made snow ice cream. They're right over the AC unit so I left them there. Figured there's no one walking around back there that could get impaled if they fell.

Jordis is finally fitting in to her Raggedy Ann outfit. My step-mom bought it for her, I think last Christmas, and she couldn't wear it. The skirt is actually still too big but if I don't put her in it soon the shirt will be too small, so I folded it down a little. She wouldn't pose for me so I bribed her by letting her stand on the sofa with her shoes on. I didn't know how long she'd wear the hat but she still had it on after church. I was impressed.

Xan likes rockin' out on his new guitar.

Pretty winter morning.

The kids love playing Wii Fit.

Jordis goes shopping.

Posing with the bird at Red Robin after Jason took us out to dinner.

Big storm. Blew a ridge vent off the roof and left us with a big hole, but we've gotten it fixed now.

Xander loves his new winter coat. And I love that I got an amazing deal on it.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Welcome to our spa and salon, Jason will be your stylist.

I think that's it. Not much going on with us. Hope you're all enjoying the end of winter. Or what I hope is the end of winter.