Valentine's Day 2011

I believe I've mentioned before on this blog that in our home Valentine's Day is a family celebrated holiday.  We usually have a special dinner together at home and tonight will be no different.  Homemade heart shaped pizzas are on the menu...complete with heart shaped plates, red cloth napkins, and candlelight!  This afternoon Eva, Jaden, and I will be making special cupcakes for our evening dessert - something we've done every Valentine's Day for about 5 years now!

As Eva and Jaden have gotten older it's so fun to watch how they remember things from year to year.  Eva was recently explaining to a friend of hers how we celebrate Valentine's Day in our house.  I loved listening to her recall the special details.  It makes me realize that the effort put into making days like this special is welllll worth it.

Another special part of Valentine's day is creating Valentine's for Eva's classmates!  This year we sat together and looked through many pictures of different creations.  Eva decided on an IPod Valentine.  This Valentine was a little more time consuming than others...so we were glad we had a few snow days last week to work on it!  The finished product looked like this (excuse the bad picture!)....

The idea is from Family Fun magazine.  We used sweetheart candies and covered it with paper (we chose red, pink, and purple)  we then attached string and Hershey kisses for the IPod earbuds.  On the front Eva cut out a copy of the front of an IPod and glued it on.  To package them we put each in small plastic treat bags.  We added ribbon and Eva made nametags for each of her classmates.  Keep in mind, Eva has 8 classmates....this would have been a pretty big project if we would have had to make 30 of them!  Ha!  One part I really liked about this Valentine was that Eva could do nearly all of it herself.  I sat with her and watched (and enjoyed just sitting and talking to her) but in all, SHE created it.  That is very important to me.

In all they turned out cute and Eva was super excited to hand them out....again, that makes all the time and effort worth it.

On a more personal note, I realized today that Matt and I have been married 12 years, and together over 16 YEARS.  Wow.  Time really flies when you are having fun.  I am one lucky girl to be married to such an amazing guy.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!