Valetine's Prep

This years Valentine's Day posts are provided by my very poor iPhone photo skills.

Making Valentines was actually documented by Ellie.  Which means most of the pictures look something like this:

Mine at least have faces! With 3 kids in school, this means I have to provide roughly 90 Valentine's Day cards and candy.  I used to have so much fun making them with Ellie and even Nate until I saw what they did with the homemade Valentines -- ripped off the candy and threw it in the trash.  No appreciating it's adorableness.  No amazement for the time involved in producing it.  No laughing over it's originality.  And so I now buy Valentines for my kids to pass out. They write their name on the bottom of that fun dip pack and we're good to go.

Luke, on the other hand, only had 7 to hand out, so we bought a kit at Target and had lots of fun making robots and aliens.

Valentine's also means -- Girl's Camp Fundraising time.  For two days straight my house was caked in oreo cookie powder and melted chocolate.  My fridge also looked something like this:

Over 550 oreo truffle balls were rolled, dipped, drizzled, packaged and distributed.  Luckily I had nothing to do with the caramels.  And even luckier -- my gifts for the teacher were all ready to go:

And thrown into our crazy week was BOY SCHOOL!  I had been so busy with everything else, that my prep consisted of the hour that morning between dropping the kids off at school and the 3 years olds arriving.  This meant Luke did not get dressed for the day.

When you're the photographer you get to stop taking pictures when just your child is smiling.  We did make some fun crafts and ate lots of candy.

Valentine's Eve, after I taught Boy school, survived half day, did teacher conferences, helped everyone with homework, went to 800 stores because Ellie needed stuff for a project, made dinner, took the Sadies to tumbling, picked up our Edible Arrangement, dropped off orders at the church and then delivered dozens of truffles to friends who had ordered, I stayed up late prepping for the morning.

I made their lunches -- complete with jokes and heart shaped strawberries.  All Dustin had to do was cut their sandwiches into hearts.

Then I cut all of their waffles into hearts for the morning, I'll spare you the pictures of those, and set the table for the next day.

Finally Dustin got home from his church appointments and we  crawled into bed and I uttered, "You didn't get me anything for Valentine's did you?  I don't want anything."  To which Dustin replied, "Is that so you don't feel guilty for not getting me anything, when you did so much for everyone else?"  Exactly.