Valentine's Day

I love Valentine's Day, but not for any of the traditional reasons. I don't love the romantic expectations and cheesiness. We can all chalk it up to way too many disappointing Valentine's days in that regard during my teens and dating years as well as a roommate and ex-boyfriend getting engaged on Valentine's Day. I really don't like Valentine's Day for the romance (although I do expect flowers or something like that from Brian because...well because!)

I do love Valentine's Day for giving us an excuse to send cheesy notes to our friends and to our kids though. I love excuse to do something sweet for someone else. I usually try to make Valentine's Day all about our kids. My parents were good at Valentine's Day, at least I think they were. My dad would bring us flowers or chocolates on Valentine's Day, and it always meant the world to me. 

This Valentine's Day, our remodel upstairs was in full swing, and so we were doing our major living downstairs. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I went to the store and bought candy to make a crafty Valentine to hand out instead of getting the ready to go ones! I decided to do candy flowers for Rachel's preschool class. Thankfully, there were only 12! She drew hearts out of green paper for the leaves and signed her name on all the leaves. Then I helped her put the flowers together:

 For Michael, I convinced him to wrap his suckers in black tissue paper and tie a tag on them that said, "You're the bomb, Valentine." It took forever, and it was tricky trying to print these since our office was torn apart. I think I ended up asking a neighbor to print the sheet out for me!

 This was the first year that Michael got to make a Valentine's Box, and I have to admit, I was a little excited to help him come up with something awesome. We made this robot box--he really did most of it and I helped a little.

 On Valentine's Day, I even did Rachel's hair like a heart!

 Gabe and I went to a neighborhood Valentine's Day party and he got to frost a cookie and get candy. It was a good day for Gabe.

 As per our tradition, we made pink heart pancakes. It was a little tricky making it happen in our small kitchen downstairs when my baking supplies were upstairs, but we made it work.

Brian brought home candy and balloons for the kids and flowers for me. In the craziness of it all, I never took a picture of my beautiful bouquet.

 I tried to even make the table look a little mores festive, despite our paper plates.

 Here's Michael's robot modeling our new floors:

 I was proud of myself for pulling off a good Valentine's Day despite having our living spaces all torn up! I sure love my little family.