Valentine's Festivities

*Sigh* I am missing those days when all my girls sat at the kitchen table a few days before Valentine's Day and made beautiful valentine cards to give to all their classmates. (Now that I think about it, I guess they all did it last year, but it seems like so long ago). This year Lacey was the only one who made valentines for the friends in her class. I found a cool kit for making "stained glass" valentines out of craft foam and tissue paper that we used for her valentines this year. Lacey was a regular pro at putting these lovelies together.


Madi did make ONE homemade valentine for her friend Nate, which she delivered via the ring-and-run approach. It added some excitement to a typical tax-season evening around here. The kids and I all hopped in the car and drove the 3 minutes it took to get to Nate's house. Madi insisted that Katie be her partner in crime and Katie graciously agreed. On the way, Madi made little rolls of tape and stuck them on Katie's arm so they could quickly pull the tape off Katie's arm and stick the paper hearts and the valentine on Nate's front door in about 30 seconds flat. Before they left the car, they had a mega-stack of construction paper hearts to stick on Nate's front door. When they got back to the car (30 seconds later - it could have even been 20 seconds), they still had half of a mega-stack of hearts because they were too chicken to stick the rest on the door. Are you kidding? You didn't use all those hearts?

Don't you remember what I went through to get the paper to make those hearts? I had about 20 minutes to buy the construction paper and get home so that we could maneuver this ring-and-run before it got too late. So there I was, 2 days before Valentine's Day, in search of RED construction paper to make the hearts. This was no easy task. I had searched a couple of stores earlier in the day with no luck at all. It must have been meant to be, because in my last-stitch effort to find this hot commodity, I hit the jackpot and bought the last dilapidated stack of red construction paper in Michael's. I did a little dance on the way out :)

Anyway - back to the ring-and-run . . . After the girls got back in the car and we sped away, Madi said "Katie, you did ring the doorbell didn't you." Katie - "I think so but I don't know for sure!" Madi - "mom, we have to drive back by to make sure Nate got his valentine." Mom - "wait - we're almost home, besides, the criminal never returns to the scene of the crime - what if we get caught?" One U-turn later . . . we're headed back to Nate's house and drive through the neighbor a "different" way so that, just in case they're looking up and down the street, they won't see us. Good news - we successfully drove past their front door without getting caught (even though Nate knew who the valentine was from because Madi signed it) and the hearts were all still on the door, but the valentine was gone. Mission accomplished!


A couple days later . . . Valentine's Day was on a Sunday, and though I was sorely disappointed to not be at the cabin celebrating President's Day weekend playing in the snow like we did last year, I decided I still wanted to make our traditional "fancy" dinner to celebrate the occasion for our little family and my parents. The past 2 years I have made an almost completely "red" dinner. I wanted to do that again, but I wasn't in the mood for pasta, which is about the only main dish I could think of that's red - although as I'm typing this, I could have done BBQ chicken. Anyway - BJs Restaurant has the awesome chicken dish and I found a copycat recipe online and decided to try it for our dinner (if you're curious, the chicken is pounded flat, breaded in Japanese bread crumbs and flour and pan fried in a little bit of olive oil. It is covered with a lemon wine sauce and garnished with sun-dried tomatoes - my red!). I spent the entire afternoon working on our dinner. I was tired, and in the end, the sauce for the chicken didn't turn out and I was more than bummed (this after the fresh strawberry frosting for the mini pink cupcakes didn't turn out like I wanted it too, either - ahhhhh!) I blamed it all on too many cooks in the kitchen (Brad, Madi, & I) and not just too many cooks, but 3 oldest-children cooks, who all would have liked to have been in charge. I was grumpy and disappointed, I will admit! All in all, the chicken was really good, even without the sauce and the cheese sauce for the broccoli tasted pretty good on the chicken (as did the homemade dijon mustard, lemon vinaigrette salad dressing). Regardless, I was so bummed I didn't even take a picture of our dinner. What a pouty-face I was! So our dinner wasn't entirely red, but the "red" for the evening included red jello, a red berry fruit salad, the sun-dried tomatoes, cherry 7-up, and grape tomatoes in the salad.

On the upside . . .

And our table looked really pretty

The kids had fun decorating our giant heart sugar cookie

and they were all happy to get a valentine present from mom and dad (note the hearts on the wall - these are part of the leftover mega-stack of hearts that never got taped to Nate's front door.)

. . . and I didn't take a picture of my beloved valentine and I that night because, sadly, we were annoyed with each other :(. Good thing we love each other so much! It's makes the occasional annoyances pretty insignificant.


And I'm just going to throw in the following picture, even though it has nothing to do with our Valentine's Day festivities . . . but just because it's so pretty . . . at Christmas our neighbors gave us a kit to grow an amaryllis. The kit sat on the counter, unopened for at least 3 weeks - maybe a month. I finally decided to open it up and give it a try. I tossed the dirt in the pretty chrome pot, stuck in the bulb, gave it lots of water and left it alone - took me all of 5 minutes. This is what we have a month later - isn't it beautiful?