Valentine Recap

Oh my goodness - I am about to cry. I just spent forever writing up a HUGE post. As I went to add the photos to my post I thought "I should save this post before I add pictures - just in case". Did I save it? Nope. Are you reading it? Nope. Did it somehow get deleted? Yup. Almost in tears....

Ok - what I said was that we had a fun Valentine season this year. Lot of fun little touches - having kids has made holidays so much funner. Gabe gets into it, loves traditions we've had and I love it! So I wanted to keep you filled into what we did the last couple of weeks.

• My mother-in-law made the boy's Valentine fun last all month long. She sent us home with a big box a few weeks ago when we were visiting that was full of little wrapped gifts for the boys for every single day of the month leading up to Valentine's Day. If it was the 4th of the month they got to unwrap a package that had 4 gifts in it. There were cute little ducks that flipped, Cars puzzles, candy treats, cards, cookies, cars - fun cute things every day. Gabe would get so excited every morning for their presents and he'd wait until Hunter woke up and then insist that I put the present behind my back and surprise them. It was so fun to have it last for 2 weeks. Thanks Grandma for all of the thought and effort that went into this sweet surprise for the boys.
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• One of the things we did this month was to have as many heart shaped treats as possible. We started with heart shaped grilled cheese - but those were a disaster....But we had heart peanut butter sandwiches, heart pizza, heart sugar cookies and yummy hug cookies. My favorite was that our local pizza place - a DELICOUS pizza place was willing to make us a heart pizza, even though they weren't making them. I had to tell them that my 3 year old wanted a heart shaped pizza, and that one of their competitors was making heart pizzas, but that I didn't want their pizza - we wanted Pioneer Pizza. Anyway, they obliged and I thought it was one of the cutest pizzas! (And yummy!)
• Gabe had his first preschool Valentine's Party. We had fun putting together his treats and valentine's for his classmates and he loved the party they had. Yummy treats, games and fun.
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• One of the fun things we did this year was since we went up north and saw grandparents at the end of January we took them fun Valentine's that we made. I cut out a bunch of different hearts on my Cricut machine. Then we added stickers, foam shapes, pictures, glitter, etc to the hearts. I hot glued skewers to the hearts (one heart on each side so the glue didn't show) and added them to cute Valentine cups which I filled with floral foam and cute paper filler. It was a very inexpensive craft, but Gabe had fun helping and I thought they turned out cute. It was fun to give them to our grandparents that we visited.
• The boys had fun opening their Valentine from Cory and I - just some little books and treats. It's fun to see them get excited about small and simple things.
• Cory got me a sweet Valentine present - some yummy bath products from The Body Shop. Thanks sweetie it's yummy!
• Cory took me out Saturday night. I was amazed that we got one of our favorite babysitters at the last minute! We went to dinner at Applebees (not my favorite, but we had some friends there in line already, so it saved us waiting forever somewhere else). Then we went to a movie (where we sat on the FRONT row - not fun) and ended the evening with YUMMY ice cream from our new favorite ice cream place - Maggie Moos. It's been a hectic time for us so it was great to reconnect with each other for a few hours. Love you sweetheart.
• One of my favorite parts of Valentine's was that we took the boys sledding. It had nothing to do with Valentine's Day, but it was the PERFECT way to spend a day that focuses on love. Gabe was much more daring than normal and had a great time zooming down the hill. He'd even trek back up by himself too (now we just need to teach him how to pull Hunter back up in the sled!) We laughed, did snow angels, had a snowball fight, and had a great time! There was a moment when all 3 boys were climbing back up the hill and I was watching them from down below. There was an instant when I was filled with a HUGE amount of joy and love. The sun was shining, the air was clear, I heard laughter of my family, and I felt just FULL of love. I wanted to take that feeling and box it up so I could open it and feel a glimpse of it every day (especially days that are rough). It was just one of those fulfilling moments - I felt blessed to feel that way and will look back on that moment as what this Valentine's Day was all about.