Our Family Valentine Celebration

Yesterday was Valentines day and we stayed in and celebrated as a family.

The girls awoke to little Valentine surprises in their mailboxes which consisted of new mini markers, a notepad, two chocolate hearts, and 2 new (to them) petshops and a velvet Valentine colouring poster each.

Ian and I only do cards but this year I made his card from a deck of cards with 52 reasons I love him.

The idea for this deck of cards came from HERE but I wanted to hand write all my reasons.

 For breakfast we had heart pancakes with bacon hearts (the bacon hearts were a bit of a fail for me) and strawberries.

We played on the light table with pieces I made from a translucent folder I got at the dollar store. The pattern source is below.

The pattern allows Aayla to complete the puzzle on her own

It was difficult for Sierra without the pattern but she got it

Her new petshops in the centre of her heart tangram

I found this picture in a search engine and made my pattern. I like that it gives you other ideas to make other shapes from the same pieces too.

Source

I'd love to have the wooden set they sell but our translucent one was great on the light table. We do have THIS wooden set of regular tangrams we love.

We baked a cake and while we waited for it to cool we had a heart filled lunch.

After lunch the cake was cool and the girls had a fabulous time decorating it. I think we need to have more fun free to decorate desert type days in our house. They LOVED it and it turned out so beautiful.

The occasional taste to make sure it's still good :)

Proud of their beautifully decorated Valentines cake

The day before Sierra and I went shopping to buy the Valentine decorations for the cake. Here is a drawing (I found taped to the drawers with the measuring cups in it) of what she thought the perfect cake would look like:

 And here is the finished cake:

 

 A pretty close representation I think!

Next we played with the pattern blocks. I don't remember where I originally got this pattern as I have had it in with my daycare themes for years. I just retraced it to have a fresh copy.

Sierra loves playing with the pattern blocks to make her own designs. I expected this activity to be more for Aayla since Sierra is older but when finished she traced all her shapes, counted how many of each there were and coloured them in to extend the learning fun.

While daddy was cooking dinner for us we all joined him to have a kitchen dance party and danced to some pretty fun tunes. I didn't get any pictures excpet this one of Sierra break dancing as we were just having too much fun!

Then it was dinner time. Ian made us one of our favourites...Seafood Linguine. We reserve it for special occasions as the ingredients are fairly expensive (cheaper than going out for dinner though) and it is oh so yummy if you like seafood.

Next it was time to eat the cake, sip on strawberry marguaritas and eat chocolate covered strawberries.

A yummy, fun filled family celebrations for Valentines day. How did your family celebrate?