Valentine's Day

Before Christmas I bought a really cool crafting machine and I am loving getting to use it! For Valentine's day I was able to do all sorts of neat items. And my boys loved it (for now; I am relishing the fact that they still enjoy their sappy mommy. I know it won't last).

One of my favorite blogs to read, eighteen25, had these photo valentine's as a free download. They measured 2x3 and you could fit 2 valentine's on a 4x6 photo. What's better is that Walgreens did a 30 prints for $3!!! I got 60 Valentine's for $3 and change (from tax). I cut out a frame with my Silhouette machine and this is how they ended up...

I bought goodies from Oriental Trading Company and made a pretty cute goodie bag (bookmark, gummy shape, pencil, and an eraser).

For the teachers, I also used a printout from eighteen25 and attached them to a chinese box. I filled them with fortune cookies.

For our decorations at home, I cut out heart spinners with the kids initial in the middle.

Carson's door- Monkeys (Tyler calls him his monkey) and a heart.

And the big boys got "heart attacks." I cut out lots of hearts and wrote on a few. This was really fun. Warren said, "Mom, you gotta be kidding me." He really was impressed.

I stole some mini candy canes from my mom. Put two together, and stuck a lollipop stick in the middle of them. Placed them on wax paper. I melted candy melts straight in ziplock bags in the microwave, and cut off the tip. Then squirted a little bit of the melted candy in the middle of the two heart-shaped candy canes and let the set up! Room temp- you don't want the candy canes to sweat in the freezer.

And I made them into our centerpiece for our Valentine's Day Mystery Dinner!

Here's our table all set up for our Mystery Dinner.

 The boys had sooooo much fun doing this. I had read about a Valentine's Mystery Dinner on another blog and decided that we HAD to do it! The boys got a printout of the menu; but instead of what we were really having, it had names like- Puppy Love, and Melted Hearts. We had 4 courses and they each had to pick 3 items to have for each course (but they didn't know what they were getting- thus the mystery of it all). One course, our friend Ed got a toothpick, a spoon, and meat sauce. Ben got an ice cream sundae, Orange Crush to drink, and a napkin (luckily, he had already chosen a spoon so he could eat it). The boys throughly enjoyed the whole dinner and asked to do it every holiday. It was a lot of work, but we plan on making it a staple for our Valentine's Dinner every year!
And at the end of it all, they got to eat the centerpiece- YUM!