The Lee Family: Olivia's Valentine's Party and Celebrating Love!

For the past few years the girls have enjoyed making and decorating sugar cookies that they then give to their friends and teachers. This week has been so busy that we finally got to making the dough on Wednesday. The dough has to stay in the refrigerator overnight and then we bake and decorate them the next day after school. I woke up Thursday morning remembering that our oven is broken! Our little tiny side oven that is barely useful for anything still works, so I figured we could bake them in that oven and just do twice as many baking rounds.

After school yesterday, I rolled out the dough and the girls had fun cutting out their Valentine's shapes and placing them on the tiny cookie sheet that fits into the small side oven. It took us a while, but it worked out just fine. The girls also enjoyed sneaking raw dough while they made cookies, of course. After the cookies were cooled, the girls had fun decorating them with colored frosting I made. I had just enough red food coloring to make one bowl, so we had one bowl of red, one of white and one of green, which was a little odd but would have to work for this Valentine's Day. They turned out to be really pretty and the girls always have fun decorating and trying to get creative. The next morning I packaged them up for Sofia's friends and Olivia's teachers.

Olivia's had spent the previous weekend making and decorating her Valentine's Box - a giraffe, of course. I found a good easy example on Pinterest (of course) and wrapped shoebox with white paper and then glued the giraffe's legs and neck onto the box. Olivia picked out paints that she wanted to use and did the entire painting job herself. She had fun decorating her new giraffe and then worked on the giraffe's head, which turned out to be really cute. The entire Valentine's box turned out to be really adorable and thanks to hot glue, it was super easy to make! Last year Sofia was really bummed that she didn't have a Valentine's box to make since there is no Valentine's party in 6th grade. This year, I figured she could go ahead and make one just for fun, but she had no interest. She does still love to pass out the cookies to her group of friends and also to a few of her favorite teachers. This year it was Ms. Bereuter and Mr. Spitsberg, her two absolute amazing teachers.

Today was Olivia's Valentine's Day party and she brought all of her Valentine's cards that each included a ring pop, to school with her to pass out to each of her classmates. I arrived just as her party was starting and couldn't believe how beautiful the room looked! We have a very creative and capable mom in our class who goes over the top with each party. It's very cool but also a little much for kids who probably don't even notice. Each of the kids had a personalized little mailbox that included candy and toys. The party included games in which the kids took turns moving candy from one bowl to another bowl using a straw and their breath. The kids were surprisingly good at this game. The other game included using a straw and shooting Q-tips into a bowl at the same time. The final game was a huge ball of saran wrap that had toys and candies wrapped in it. Each kiddo had time to unroll it for 30 seconds and then had to pass it on. It was really cute and the kids loved it.

After all the games, the kids enjoyed an ice cream sundae, which of course they gobbled down. After their sundaes, it was time to clean up and the kids headed out for Specials. They had fun and it was great to be there for Olivia's party.

That night, we decided to make a really nice dinner instead of going out to dinner and chose our usual steak, salad and cauliflower. One of our favorite recipes and also very easy. It was delicious and CK had given each of us a very thoughtful Valentine's card, as well as an absolutely beautiful bouquet of flowers! He's also so thoughtful and great at thoughtful gifts and expressing his feelings on paper. For dessert we had chocolate lava cakes and vanilla ice cream. We were stuffed! Such a fun Valentine's Day!!

Sofia cutting her Valentine's cookies