Happy Valentines Day!

I know that Valentines Day is a Hallmark created holiday but I still love it. It gives me excuses to shower my boys with extra love and surprises and gifts and hugs. What's not to love about that? Stephen had to work so we had a pretty low key Valentines ourselves. I arranged for a sitter and I took him to get pedicures and out for lunch. He loved the pedicure. He keeps saying, "my feet have never felt so amazing and that paraffin wax thing was great!"
We started out with heart shaped pancakes for breakfast and we had heart shaped sandwiches for lunch.


We made about a million Valentines this week, I was very grateful when that undertaking was finished! Just card stock, glue and crayons and some of those foamy stickers but the kids had a blast making them and I think they turned out pretty cute!


We ended the day with a treasure hunt. My boys LOVE scavenger hunts/treasure hunts and the like. In the interest of time I did a simple trail laden with cards that belonged to a really cute Valentines bingo came that I bought online and jelly beans. They had to pick up the bingo cards and the jelly beans along the way and follow the trail that went up three levels. Once they got to the top they got the big jackpot!



I didn't want to buy them anything that was going to be laying around accumulating space we don't have or getting broken or forgotten about. So I got them popping corn (cause we were out), rented a movie from RedBox (love those 1.00 rentals), made them a Pirate Valentine in keeping with the treasure hunt theme (arrrg me heartys, I luvs ya!) and a dust buster! Yes you read correctly a Dust Buster so they could vacuum up the popcorn if it spills (and it always spills)...plus they can do many other future chores with it! They loved it and we really needed a dust buster since ours broke 3 years ago. Kind of lame I know but I was really going to resourceful and practical! After the treasure hunt we played a rousing game of bingo using the jelly beans as markers...they loved it!
And the best part of the day is hearing "your the best mommy in the world", "you rock our world mommy!", "thank you for all the surprises mommy!"... that just melts my heart!

This is a picture of one of my most successful treasure hunts. It was for Gabriel's 8th birthday and using a legend I prepared for him he had to decode the message in order to find where his birthday gifts were hidden. He LOVED it! It's much cooler if you click on the photo and see it larger!