I love Valentine’s Day.  I love pink and purple and flowers and candy.  I’m a girl…I’m allowed to admit that!  I particularly love it because I get to do fun things for my family.  Any excuse to tell them how much I love them.  I’m all over it!   The last two years we have gone skiing around the holiday so we haven’t been very extravagant.  In fact, this year Morgan pointed out to me that I didn’t do much decorating for Valentine’s Day!!  What the heck!?  Actually, I really don’t have many decorations to speak of – so I guess she’s right!

Last year was my absolute favorite when I came home and Morgan had decorated for a family valentines party!  It melted my heart and I think it’s ADORABLE that she did that for us!  You ROCK MoMo!

This year I got up extra early to decorate the kitchen and make pink heart-shaped pancakes for the kids.  This seemed like a fabulous idea at the time.  First of  all, a bunch of pressure built up in my plastic bottle I was using to draw the heart shapes and blew the lid off – splattering pink batter all over me and my stove. I thought they turned out pretty cute for my first time but I think maybe a total of….well let’s see…one pancake…was actually eaten.  My kids don’t eat a lot of breakfast.  Don’t you think they could’ve choked them down just for me!?  I even had trays of chocolate chips and M&M’s out to pile on top of their pancakes!   Hmmm…maybe I should’ve just slept in instead!

Of course, I had their school valentines ready to go and I like to order them online with their picture on them.  I always thought they were super cute and different from all the rest of the school valentines.  Who knew that Jake was actually embarrassed to have his picture on his!!  Yep – after his school party this year he said…”mom next year can we not put my picture on mine because it’s sort of embarrassing.”  Huh??  How can this be!?  Well, lucky for you Jake, this is your last year doing school valentines since you will be in middle school next year.  And just for the record, Jake, I get a lot of compliments on these from other moms. 😉  He’s going to be really mortified when he’s like 16 and I’m still doing this.  I’m kidding!!

  Luckily, I still have a 6 year old that loves valentine’s day and could not wait to make an awesome box.  Hands down, one of my favorite things to do!

Brian told her to just keep it simple and not put a lot on it.  I quickly disagreed and suggested putting as much stuff on this box as we could!!

Morgan made these little heart sandwich cookies for Reece’s soccer team.  They loved them!

Somehow I found myself on the volunteer list to plan all of the 5th grade games for the school party.  I honestly do not know how this happened but I embraced it because this is Jake’s very last elementary school party!!  boo!  I spent a lot of hours researching and cutting out hearts and hot gluing.  I will forever have tiny scraps of pink and red poster board in every crevice of my van.  Luckily, I love arts and crafts.  I just don’t love them as much when I’m trying to pack a family of 6 for a ski trip!  I begged Brian to help me run the games because I had already signed up to volunteer in my 2 other classrooms.  This was definitely not planned out well.  Jake was so sweet, helping me decide which games would be best and trying them out for me in our family room.  Thank you, Jake, for totally being on my side.

Here are a few pics from my other valentine school parties…

We had several sports practices in the evening so we were forced into a super early 5PM Mexican dinner out and chocolate covered strawberries for dessert.  Love all of my sweet valentines….

You’ll all be happy (and not surprised) to know that Reece spent half her Valentine’s day money on a mermaid tail for “Ellie” her stuffed animal…