Valentine's Day

It is hard to believe a year has passed since our chocolate dipped strawberries last Valentine's Day!  And hard to believe I've been at this blogging thing for over a year now as well since that was one of my first few posts.

As you have come to know, I like to try to do fun little things with our meals and snacks for all the holidays/events, so I combed Pinterest for Valentine's Day ideas and found a few I thought we'd test out this year.  I also found a couple art ideas that we tried as well.  And now I can share them with you, along with some cute pics of the kids, of course!

I was hosting the weekly Wednesday morning playgroup that Riley and I are part of on Feb 13th, so I figured I do a little Valentine's Day theme for the snacks.  I made the raspberry swirl cheesecake cupcakes that I made last spring, m&m chocolate pretzel bites (I put the kids to work on these ones with STRICT no nose picking or sampling while making for others rules!), heart shaped cucumbers to go with the hummus, and heart shaped ice cubes.  I also did muffins and other dippers for the hummus, but none of those were specific to Valentine's Day.

Roy surprised us with beautiful flowers and balloons in the kitchen when we woke up on the 14th, and I surprised the kids with some stickers and pipe cleaners and some strawberry and cream cheese stuffed french toast for breakfast (Leighton LOVED it ... Riley wouldn't touch it).  I upped the heart factor a bit by making a heart on top of each piece with powdered sugar!

In Leighton's lunch, I packed hummus with some of the heart shaped cucumbers and did some heart shaped bread, too.  I also sent red raspberries and broke my no treat rule and sent a couple of the pretzels he had worked so hard on for me.

After Riley and I picked Leighton up from school, we did a little Valentine delivery and dropped off Valentines that Leighton had made all his friends on our old street.  He had come up with the plan to make them on his own, and he did a wonderful job writing and decorating them.  Riley, too!  We then raced home to quickly make the special little project for Daddy.

For dinner, I made our favorite pork schnitzel with roasted potatoes and almond green beans.  Leighton requested heart shaped schnitzel, so I gave it a shot for my boy :)  I had a few different cakes and desserts I wanted to sample, but we had far too many of the cheesecakes leftover that needed to be consumed.

 And that, my friends, was Valentine's Day 2013!