Valentine's Fun

I really love Valentine's Day. Last year I declared it our official crafty holiday and this year it was the same. J and Elina made a pink Valentine's foam house for our dining table and then L and Elina painted heart-shaped magnets I made out of Plaster of Paris. Elina, J, and I also made cute Valentine's Day cards for her friends and classmates. We made little flowers with lollipops in the middle as her cards (an idea from Family Fun magazine). It was actually more work than I had imagined. Elina helped cut out the hearts (for petals) and leaves, but after awhile she complained that her hand was getting tired. So J had to finish all the cutting. I made the holes in everything to make the flowers and Elina handwrote the to/from on each flower that we made. She did an awesome job because we had to make about 16 or so. They turned out really cute so it was worth it.
We also had our playgroup Valentine's Day party earlier in the week. We really missed having KL and E around this year, but we made do with what we could. The kids painted Valentine's Day suncatchers and played Valentine's Bingo...and of course we had our usual yummy treats. I made my rainbow jello hearts again (a surprise since it was time-consuming last year!) and raspberry cheesecake brownies. We also had yummy salsa, heart-shaped sandwiches, pigs in a blanket in heart-shapes, and of course...LW's delicious heart-shaped cake. Last year LW made an ice-cream cake (she used to work at Baskin Robbins), but this year it was a white cake with her amazing raspberry white-chocolate filling...we didn't mind one bit! Overall, a delicious, fun time for all of us!
This year I finally got the kids little tin mailboxes and had them decorate them at the end of January. Then every morning, beginning on February 1, I put a clue into the mailboxes that led to a treat or a treasure. For the first 10 days, it's nothing too extravagant. It might be some heart-shaped chocolate or candy I have laying around or coloring pages. Regardless though, every morning Elina would check if her mailbox flag was up or down. She was so excited about it. Some nights I wouldn't feel well enough to write a clue and hide something, so she told J that if the flag was down "that means that Mommy didn't feel well last night." So those were the days when I wrote a clue later in the day. Elina was also a very good big sister. She would read Eli his clues and then lead him to where his treat/prize was. Eli wasn't as into the whole thing, but he enjoyed the treats at the end.
Then for the last few days before Valentine's Day the prizes got a little bigger. One day they each got new Valentine's books, then Pez dispensers, and then for Valentine's Day, the grand prize was a View Master for them to share. For the grand prize, the scavenger hunt was a lot longer. There were 6 clues all together and I guess I made some of them too hard because we really had to help Elina along at times. But in the end they thought the View Master was the coolest thing ever. (It definitely looks cooler than it used to.)

On Valentine's Day, we started our morning with heart-shaped pancakes and heart-shaped eggs. Elina ate both her chocolate chip pancakes and her eggs. This is a lot of food for Elina! Maybe I should make everything in the shape of a heart, if it'll get her to eat more! For lunch we ordered the heart-shaped pizza from Papa John's because Elina thought it sounded like the coolest thing ever. She said, "I wonder how they make it into a heart shape? I know! They make the pizza round first and then they take food scissors and cut the pizza into the shape of a heart. Then they sprinkle candy on it!" I just thought it was funny that she differentiates between "food scissors" and regular scissors. (And she added the candy on the pizza because she wanted to be silly.) We had the pizza with pink smoothies and heart-shaped rainbow jello (like last year). Eli seriously ate 6 of those jello hearts by himself.


We had to do our Valentine's Day pink/red meal earlier in the day this year because we attended one of Elina's classmates' birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese in the evening. So, yes, we ate pizza at 2 meals for Valentine's Day. Sounds sick, but I didn't really mind much.

We also made our traditional Valentine's Day crowns/headbands to wear. The kids had fun decorating them and they looked really cute, but B said that Uncle J would definitely disapprove of Eli wearing his around the house. But don't they look cute?