Valentine's Day

On Valentine's Day, I had my annual Valentine's Day tea party with the girls. I made scratch off cards for invitations so the girls had to scratch off the gold heart to reveal the time and location. We had a fun tea party lunch with heart-shaped sandwiches, strawberries, pink lemonade, and cakes and brownies. I also gave the girls chocolate roses which they thought were the coolest thing ever. They put on jewelry and hair accessories and loved talking about tea party etiquette. Oliver eventually joined us and mostly just used the word "poop" repeatedly to try and get a laugh.

Ben and I reminisced about the Valentine's Day we spent in Paris 10 years ago when I was just pregnant with Amelia. Life is a little different now. While I went out to do a run, Ben surprised me by preparing a gourmet dinner. Roasted duck with a pomegranate sauce, couscous and broccoli. For dessert he made grilled apples with cheese, roasted pecans and a honey glaze! It was all delicious. He even made an effort to keep it light and healthy since we're doing another weight loss contest right now. The girls ended the evening with an impromptu show they put on for us. We were issued tickets and then they performed a comedy routine and a dance show. Who needs to go out when we have all the entertainment we need right here at home. It was the perfect ending to our day.

valentine prep

The art room table was filled with an explosion of pink and red hearts and craft supplies for several days leading up to Valentine's Day. We put out our little mailboxes early in the month and left notes and treats for each other every day leading up to Valentine's Day. The girls always love doing this. Elsa made Valentines from her class using some little notepads and stamps we found at Target. Oliver made fishbowl Valentines because he loves Swedish fish (I think we've done these 3 or 4 times now). Amelia wanted to make clay heart necklaces for the girls in her class (the boys got notepads and stamps). She used some red, pink and white Sculpey for the hearts and the necklaces were really easy to make.

Heart-shaped sugar cookies are always a must.

I made these cherry almond shortbread kiss cookies for a girls night and they were really yummy. (Recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction.)

I attended a cookie exchange at church that same week so I also made one of my favorites, nutella stuffed brown butter chocolate chip cookies with sea salt.

warm day.

A few weeks ago we had a really warm Monday. Which is hard to even imagine right now since we just received two more snow storms this week after a snow/ice storm last week. I let the kids stay home from school on this warm day and I'm glad we took advantage of it (I think Ben was on a work trip to Charleston and Knoxville that week). We had a lunch picnic outside and the kids spent the whole day playing in the yard. The girls showed me some of their secret hideouts in the woods where they created thrones for themselves. We also worked on the fairy garden and installed an elf door!

The kids have been using our dead and burned Christmas tree to hold all of the balls.

Saturday Outing: Raven Rock

Our Saturday mornings are filled with gymnastics and ballet now, but we were feeling the need for an adventure a few weeks ago so we headed to Raven Rock State Park for an afternoon hike. It's located less than an hour away and was a great spot for a winter hike. The rock formations were really cool and many had icicles hanging from them. The kids loved climbing all over and exploring. They were distracted enough that they didn't even complain during the 3 1/2 mile hike. There weren't many other people out on the trail which was also nice.

fun with sculpey: marbled clay dishes

I picked up a bunch of Sculpey clay a few months ago to try a few projects and finally got around to using it last week. I made these marbled clay ring dishes (tutorial from A Beautiful Mess) and then tried out some hearts in preparation for Valentine's Day. It was my first time using gold liquid gilding (for painting the rims) and it was really fun to work with. It was fun to experiment with the Sculpey and try different color combinations. It was an easy project to do with the kids too.