Love, Love, Love

I've always liked Valentine's Day. It's a fun holiday. Once I got married, it started to be one of my favorite holidays. Christian always manages to make me feel really special. I was kind of skeptical this year because Christian was gone at work/school from 7:30 am to 10:30 pm, but still ended up being an awesome day.

When I checked the mail on Feb. 13th, there were two packages for the kids from their grandparents. The first thing the kids did when they woke up was open them up. Among other things, they each got a stuffed bear (a brown one for James which Kate named Chocolate and a pink one for Kate which she named Strawberry) and an 'I Spy' matching game, which we sat down and played about 7 times.

After a lovely morning of story time and reading library books, we came home, the kids took naps, and went out for a walk. As we walked out the door, I saw this on the porch.
It was from my wonderful husband! I'm not sure I've mentioned this before, but getting an eatable bouquet has been one of my life-long dreams. Kate and James also loved it. Just as a side-note, Kate got this shirt in the mail the other day from her great-grandma. It's her absolute favorite. Somewhere along the line she started calling it her 'angry bird shirt'. It always makes me laugh when she says it. Anyway, on with my story.

While we were out on our walk a neighbor saw us and said, "Hey! Do your kids like grapes? My work gave me ten bags and I can't eat all of them." I said that we would love some and he said, "Great. Would you be my Valentine?" he said turning to Kate. She emphatically said yes and proudly brought home her great big bag of grapes.

Here's a picture of James with his Valentine mailbox. We each had one. Kate wrote us all Valentines and stuck them in our mailboxes over and over again. Actually she also wrote a valentine to all her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and several of her friends (she was REALLY into writing valentines). I told her that I would send them. Yesterday night I ended up throwing them away. It was kind of like telling a kid that I was sending the dog to live on a ranch. I felt a little guilty, but mostly I didn't want to spend the money on postage.