Tuesday, February 25, 2014

A Little Valentine’s Fun

Jade and I had a girls’ morning on a Saturday when one of her best friends from school had a birthday party.  She held it at Ava’s Cupcakes, which apparently was a winner on the show Cupcake Wars.  Kinda fun, very delicious!  IMG_1788

When I asked Jade if she’d rather buy Olivia a card or make one, my little artist of course opted to make one.  IMG_1779

At the party the kids decorated aprons, then made and decorated cupcakes.  While the kids were busy having a great time, I was thrilled to have the chance to meet some of the other “school moms!” 

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Jade keeps telling me she wants play dates with all these different kids, but I told her a lot of the moms work and they probably won’t let their child come over until they’ve met me.  I exchanged a few #s and got the “OK” to pick some kids up from school sometime.  That was perfect because we wanted to have a Valentine’s play date shortly thereafter!

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After the party, Jade and I enjoyed perusing Target’s aisles solely dedicated to Valentine’s Day.  It was just a little too much fun.  Every little thing that is our “first” in our first year back in America is so exciting! 

Jade needed to make a Valentine’s box for her very first school Valentine’s party.  It took some major self control to limit the V-day items she picked out; we were both just so excited!  We did pretty good limiting it to just a few items.  Then we had fun preparing her box and cards together throughout the next week. 

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I got in touch with the moms of Jade’s best friends at school and invited them over for a Valentine’s Day play date.  Jade also wanted to invite the new girl in class so she wouldn’t be left out.  A big snowstorm was coming, so we moved the party up a day.  It was a good thing we did, because we ended up snowed in for the next two days!  More on that another time.

Ridge and Jade helped me make sugar cookies the night before.  Well, Jade helped.  Ridge mostly just ate the batter.  IMG_1869

After school the next day, two of the kids came home with us and the other two came over with their moms.  Counting all the younger siblings, we had eight kids at our house to play!  It was a little crazy at times.  But fun.  We started out with a snack, then let the kids play for a bit. 

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Later on, we came back to the table to decorate heart sugar cookies. 

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Jade tells me each of these kids are her best, best, best, best friends.  She also tells me that Jake is her brother because they have the same color hair, they look the same, their names are almost the same, and they talk the same. 

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One of Jade’s talents is definitely making friends and being a good friend.  I really love that about her. 

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Like I mentioned, it snowed the next two days, so Jade was home from school on Valentine’s Day.  They ended up having their school party on Monday.  We had leftover cookie stuff, so we decorated cookies again on our snow days. 

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The kids received a few V-day surprises as we ate red velvet pancakes for breakfast.  I think of Bill Cosby’s bit about the kids singing his praises as they eat chocolate cake for breakfast.  These pancakes are totally dessert for breakfast.  That’s what holidays are for, right?!   

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Our Valentine’s Day ended perfectly as Cody and I had our first date since Tanner was born.  A great way to end a fun day spent with these three loves. IMG_2022

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