February Highlights: Valentine's Day

         The week leading up to Valentine's Day we set up our own little mail center and wrote and delivered love notes to each member of the family.  On our Valentine's Day family party, we opened up the boxes and read all the notes.  There were sweet notes from everybody, but I was particularly touched and impressed with Little Man.  He had written so many notes to everyone in the family without any help from anyone.  They were all written with "inventive" spelling, as they call it in first grade, which made for some interesting reading on some of the ones he wrote earlier in the week and couldn't remember exactly what he meant to say.  For all his crazy, loud, little boyness he has such a tender, thoughtful heart.  

Abby is having Valentine's Day dinner in a swim suit and shorts...why?  That's a good question.

We had our family party Monday the 13th.  Our menu consisted of heart shaped grilled cheese, heart shaped jello jigglers (which none of my children liked), regular shaped vegetables, love soup (tomato soup),  and heart shaped Rice Krispie treats.  We then opened up our notes from each other and watched "Peter Pan Returns to Neverland," a Disney channel movie that premiered that night which the kids, especially Kiwi, had been looking forward to for weeks.  

 On actual Valentine's Day, Kiwi had a preschool party and twirled around our family room in her red skirt.

 Little Man brought home twenty five little Valentine's and an assortment of candy, stickers, and stick on tattoos which he promptly dumped on the kitchen table the moment he walked in the door.
These two spent a good portion of the afternoon going through all their Valentine treasures, making some trades (Little Man gave Kiwi a Snow White sticker that came with one of his Valentine's, while Kiwi gave him a Cars sticker that came with one of hers), organizing their candy and treats, and telling each other who in their class gave them each card.

This little guy went from heartbroken to thrilled when after being denied all the candy he was pointing to and trying to ask for (I noticed this year that almost all Valentine's day candy is a choking hazard, at least the cheap stuff that comes home with the kids), he was instead given chocolate chips.  He loves chocolate chips.

When Mike got home from work, we exchanged gifts.  He and Little Man had chosen a beautiful charm bracelet for me with a couple of charms to start off with.  I love it and am looking forward to adding more to it.  We then had take out for dinner after the kids were in bed. I thought of having Little Man come downstairs and take a picture of us eating to document our Valentine's Day date of 2012, but that would have required walking upstairs to get him, most likely having Kiwi also accompanying us downstairs, both of them wanting to take a picture, check the picture, and then probably wanting to be tucked back in, so I skipped the picture and so there is no photograph to document our date. Although I am re-resolving myself to taking more pictures of Mike and I, so that someday when our great great grandchildren are looking through our photos they will see that there were parents that belonged to these three children that there are thousands of pictures of.  

It was a good day.