A Belated Valentine's Day Post

Lately, I have not been a fan of Valentine's Day. In fact, over the past few years, I've started looking at it as just another day, not getting what the huge deal was. Then I read this inspiring post by TB over at Year 31. She basically says that Valentine's Day should be spent celebrating all kinds of love, not just for couples. I am totally on board with this. And when I looked at Valentine's Day from that perspective, I started getting excited.

I was also envious of the awesome Valentine's Day crafts that she created with her son, and was finding myself regretting that I hadn't planned anything like that for Owen and Ben. But then she kindly pointed out to me that Valentine's Day wasn't here yet, so I still had time to do something. And I did. We totally winged it, but here's how Owen and I celebrated Valentine's Day:

Owen attends a playgroup at a local college that meets every Monday and Wednesday (two hours with just one child!) We were lucky enough to be assigned snack duty on Valentine's Day. We wanted to make something Valentine-themed, but unfortunately, the one time that I actually went to the store, I forgot to pick up decorating items for his snack. So, I improvised. His playgroup is in the morning, so I didn't want to do anything super sugary for snack. I settled on making apple muffins and disguised them as cupcakes. (I'm tricky like that sometimes)

We had some white frosting leftover from my birthday (it was still good, I read the label), and through a stroke of genius, I realized that we could use some strawberry Jell-O powder to color the frosting pink. I am brilliant. (And as an added bonus, the frosting became strawberry flavored!). Owen decorated the "cupcakes" with some red sugar leftover from Christmas cookies.

He likes to keep things centered.

Wordless Wednesday (Kind of): HAPPI...

My birthday was on January 17th. This was my cake:

You may be thinking, Awww. How nice. Owen decorated a cake for his mommy!

And you would be wrong.

This lovely creation was (primarily) decorated by someone who does not plan ahead to make sure there are sufficient cake decorations in the pantry. In a word, Daddio.

(With some help from Owen).

Festive Flashback II: My, What Big...Eyes? You Have?

Continuing with my "better late than never" theme...

To keep Owen busy (read: out of my hair) one day while I was decorating the house for Christmas, I cut out two gingerbread people for him to decorate. I was hoping that he would do a nice enough job that we could use them as ornaments for the tree. I explained to him that the one with legs was the man and the one with the skirt was the woman. He immediately said, "That can't be a woman. Where are her boobies?" Nice. 

I left him alone for a few minutes, and when I returned, this is what he had made:

You'd be grinning too if your woman had a rack like that.

He then explained to me that the man was him and the woman was his "girlfriend" Lilly. That's one well-developed four-year-old!