Valentine's Day

To see some pictures of our day, go here!

Valentine's Day was a nice but low-key event around here. As much as I had wanted to create some handmade decorations like we did for Christmas, I just ran out of time. We enjoyed a wonderful service at church (first Sunday for the "Love Affair" theme, celebrating God's gift of marriage) together, and then I brought the kids home while Ted stayed to play guitar for the second service. I managed to get Lucan fed and down for a nap and make our V-Day dinner: Chicken Cacciatore with egg noodles, homemade sourdough bread, and vegetables. Ted brought home roses for Kenna and Charis (and new massage oils for me, yay!). The kids put out the Valentines they had made for each other (I supervised that activity on Friday during school time) and for Ted and me. They were very cute! Red-stamped hearts and sweet hand-written messages--what better Valentine can you get?! We got the older kids Extreme Dot-to-Dot books, drawn by our talented friend Adam T. from Las Vegas, who works with Mindware to create very cool coloring and activity books. Kenna got a new Play Dough toy since she has been a Play Dough fiend since Christmas, and Lucan got lots of hugs and kisses.

I enjoyed a loooong nap in the afternoon. We fixed dinner for the kids and finished our Sonlight read-aloud from last week (The School Story--very good book), and then the older kids watched a couple of Peanuts Valentine's cartoons while I ran out to get Chinese take-out for Ted and me. Our preferred restaurant is closed on Sundays (kind of like Chik-Fil-A, sigh), so we tried a different one that was decent, but not quite as good. Ah, well. It was a nice dinner for us! We watched the premier of the new Amazing Race season while the kids settled down (which took awhile) and finally enjoyed a quiet evening together despite Lucan's best efforts. :-)