V-Day

Every year, I swear that I will save my time and money and just go buy a box of Valentine's for the kids at the store rather than trying to make something homemade, and then without fail, every year we see something that looks too fun and we opt to spend hours and $$$ making homemade Valentines instead.

It was worth it though.  With our daddy out of town so much this month, we have needed some activities to keep us busy.  Here is what we came up with:

For the teachers, a brownie mix with a note that says "Shooting for Brownie Points".  Not that my little darlings need brownie points.  Just finished up with parent teacher conferences and am proud to say that all of my kids are doing so well in school.  What a relief and honor as a mother to hear how wonderful my children are from their teachers.

Ian gave each student in his class a little kit to make a glider plane that said, "Valentine, you are just "plane" awesome."

Charlotte and Bronson did several crafts at home with me and made these cute handprint hearts to put on their daddy's pillow.

Tanner and Ashlyn were asked to make boxes for their Valentines in addition to bringing Valentine's this year.  Of course my little hoopster chose to make a basketball box.  His box won an award in his class for "Sportiest Box".  He was all smiles.

He is my only kid who opted for store bought Valentine's this year and he chose these 3-D animal Valentines.

Ashlyn made an owl box and won an award for "Prettiest Box".  She was also quite thrilled.

And she chose to get some folding fans from Oriental Trading and tied a note to them that said, "Valentine, I'm your Biggest Fan!"  She said they were a huge hit with her classmates... and also that the boys "hit" each other with the fans and broke them within minutes :(

We made sure we got up early enough to make some festive Valentine hair-dos.

And even Char's hair was longish enough for a little heart.

On the actual day of Valentine's my kids were out of school as it landed on a Friday and we have Friday's out of school in our district.  We used our time to make kiss cookies to take into Daddy's work.  And picked up some heart pizzas from Papa Murphy's and oddly enough had a movie night where we watched the Thanksgiving themed movie, Free Birds.  The kids loved it and didn't even care it was a Thanksgiving movie.

Zac surprised us that morning by getting up super early and making chocolate dipped strawberries.  He also wrote me a very thoughtful and romantic poem, which I will treasure forever.  In return, I scheduled a date for the following day to the temple and dinner with my sweetie.  Could there be a better place in the whole world to spend time with the one you love most than at the temple?  It was a perfect end to our Valentine's Day.