Our Valentine’s Day was filled with simple fun. We made German pancakes for breakfast, had a delicious dinner of shrimp and scallops and I fell asleep as Ryan was reading aloud to Chase before 9 p.m. I was exhausted and a cozy Valentine’s Day at home was all I wanted. I also absolutely loved looking through our boys’ Valentines with them after school. Does anyone else remember overanalyzing Valentines from your elementary school crush to see if maybe there was any hidden meaning in the little cardboard Valentine they tore out of a pack of 12 just for you?
Our big kids’ school has a tradition where they do a short poem for each kid in their class rather than a traditional Valentine (they have more than a month to work on them) and it’s so cute to read little snapshots into how their classmates view them at school. Chase was also awfully sweet and followed his class Valentine format to make Valentines for me and Ryan as well.
You know that one is going in my “keeper” pile.
Our Valentine’s Day was wonderful in its simplicity and we continued more of our fun on Saturday!
Saturday
The cold, wet weather continued through the weekend but we still managed to make the most of it. I’ve been meaning to better organize the boys’ art supplies (specifically their markers, crayons, gel crayons, etc.) and finally got around tackling this task on Saturday.
I used this storage bin to organize everything and it worked well because the inner bins were long enough to hold colored pencils and Crayola Clicks markers which wasn’t the case with other craft organization bins we’ve tried (and returned) in the past.
Here’s the before:
And the after:
(Still loving our Walmart cane cabinets so much!)
Oh happy day!
Since we had a bunch of broken crayons on our hands after going through everything, we decided to give homemade heart crayons a go. My mom sent me pictures of a similar project she did with my sister’s kids which inspired me to try it with our boys.
Two tips we found extra helpful: 1. Place the crayons in warm water to soak before peeling and breaking them up into small pieces. This will make the paper easier to peel off and the crayons easier to break. 2. Overfill your silicone molds with the crayon pieces. The crayons melt down quite a bit!
We then baked the crayons in the oven at 350 degrees until all the pieces were melted (our molds were rather small, so ours were done in less than 10 minutes) and then we left them out to cool until they were completely hard.
The boys got a kick out of this project and now we have some fun heart crayons to use for various craft projects!
Once craft time was done, it was late in the morning and we were all ready for our big adventure of the day: Our annual Valentine’s Day Mission!
When Ryan and I were dating, we used to split up at the same time on Valentine’s Day, set a budget and then come back together to swap little surprises. This is now a tradition we love doing with our boys! We divided up into teams at Target — Ryan and Ryder and then me, Chase and Rhett — and the boys spent about 30 minutes shopping for a little surprise or two for each other.
The boys get SO into it every year and it’s always a lot of fun for me and Ryan to hear the thought process behind the gifts they choose for each other. (Legos reigned supreme for the big kids this year while Rhett was thrilled with a new Paw Patrol toy Ryder selected for him.)
We ended our fun with cake pops (for the boys) and chai lattes (for me and Ryan) and had such a fun time. Our boys truly look forward to this day all year long and it’s been such a treasured tradition for our family!
Since the rain was still coming down hard outside, we figured we should continue with the indoor fun and ended up driving to Great Wolf Lodge.
Last week, at a birthday party, another mom told me the ultimate Great Wolf Lodge hack for kids who love MagiQuest: You can go to GWL and pay only $15 to activate a MagiQuest wand and do MagiQuest all over the hotel without paying for a full day pass. It was the best tip and we spent $30 to activate Chase and Ryder’s wands (Rhett was just thrilled to have a wand that lights things up) and spent 2+ hours running all over the place.
Eventually we made our way home and dug into fish tacos for dinner. I followed this recipe for the tacos and the cilantro lime slaw and Ryan and I loved them! (The boys opted for leftover shrimp, though Chase ate some of the fish, too!)
We spent the rest of our evening building Legos and relaxing a bit before the usual bedtime routine.
Once all the boys were in bed, Ryan and I streamed the show Landman and I’m on the fence about this one. My parents and a handful of my college girlfriends all highly recommended it to us but I don’t love a lot of violence and stress when I watch a show so we’ll see. (The first episode gave me Breaking Bad vibes which I initially liked but eventually abandoned because it was too dark and stressful for me.) Anyone else out there a Landman fan? Should I stick with it?
Sunday
Sunday was a very relaxed day. It was cold and rainy to start (again) and Ryan and I took turns getting in our respective workouts. After that, though, we showered and spent some chill time at home. While the boys played, Ryan and I carved out some time to do a couple of hours of Alaska vacation research and planning. Back in the fall when we initially began planning, we were fairly positive we were going the cruise route but, honestly, it was emails from a few of YOU that encouraged us to pivot our plans. We’re trying to be cognizant of planning a trip our kids will really enjoy and let go of any self-imposed pressure to “see all the things” while we are there. If we can see whales, bald eagles and be together, we’ll be thrilled! This is truly a bucket list trip for our family and I cannot wait! Seeing whales in the wild has been a dream of mine for my entire life.
After lunch, we piled into the car and took the boys out of the house for some playtime at Discovery Place Kids.
We’ve been members of this local children’s museum since Chase was a baby and somehow it has never lost its luster for our boys. They spent about 90 minutes running around until we noticed the sun was finally coming out! We quickly made our way home and spent some much-needed time outside. Ryan and I both said finally seeing the sun after a week straight of rain felt amazinggg. Pepper was especially peppy!
The boys are absolutely loving the dirt bikes they received for Christmas (without a doubt their favorite gift this year) and watching them fly all over the place on trails together makes us smile so big. They’re definitely in their element doing something fast and outside together!
(Check out Rhett’s mud-covered back in the above photo. Is this the 4-year-old dirt bike edition of a blow out?!)
Once we made it home, Ryan handled the boys’ dinner and evening routine while I headed out to meet up with my girlfriends for our annual Galentine’s Favorite Things night!
It’s one of our favorite annual traditions (you can read all about how we plan it along with some gifting tips here: Favorite Things) and it’s always so fun to open fun little surprises and hear more about why each person chose the gift(s) they chose.
This year my favorite things included Skoy non-scratching dish scrubbers (three of us had these in our gift bags — they’re amazing, I’m telling you!), a cute pair of socks and the Gorjana necklace I haven’t taken off since my parents gave it to me for my birthday last year.
I LOVE the necklace so, so much and the quality is amazing. (I wear it when I work out, shower, etc. and it still looks brand new.) Anyway, the backstory on this Favorite Things gift is a little crazy… Back in December, I went to the Gorjana website to try to order the same necklace for my sister for Christmas but they were all sold out. Some internet deep diving led me to find the same $75 necklace on TJMaxx.com for only $12.99! I scooped up a bunch (enough for my sister, for our favorite things exchange and two more for extra gifts) and was thrilled!! TJMaxx has the original price wrong (it says $18 but when the necklaces arrived, the original tag says $75 and it’s definitely the same necklace as mine) so it was a steal of a find!! (Just beware the clasp is a little tricky nad I needed to watch this video to figure it out. Yes really.)
As for the gifts my girlfriends brought as their favorite things this year, there were a lot of fun finds including dark chocolate, a favorite mug, a 30-day peace prayer journal, cherry blossom tea, a tote bag, a puffy pink cosmetic bag, hair ties that look like bracelets on your wrist, Kosas plumping lip oil, car seat headrest hooks (I’m so excited for these for our boys’ backpacks!), a workout headband, a car visor sunglasses clip, Hairitage texturizing powder and hair rollers.
It was also fun to chat about past favorite things we’ve exchanged that have become favorite things among our entire group! A few that came up: Collapsible storage tote (I use mine to store our boys’ costumes), TUL gel pens (they write like a dream), electric lighter (you already know I’m obsessed) and eyelash primer mascara (it makes such a difference for fuller, longer lashes).
By the time I arrived home, Rhett was in bed but I joined Ryan to tuck in the big kids and then we headed to bed to read until we both could no longer keep our eyes open.
As for today, it will be a full but fun one with the boys out of school. We have plans to make it to Burn Boot Camp, hit up a local play place and take the dirt bikes out with Pepper again. I hope you all have a great day and, for those of you off from school and work for President’s Day today, I hope you’re enjoying your extra long weekend!
