I love holidays

Really, I do.  I think about ancient and medieval Europeans a lot when I think about holidays.  Yeah, some of their holidays were religious, but a lot of them were just to mix things up a bit and free them of the monotony of their lives.  Now, don't get me wrong, I love my "job" but sometimes it's nice to be able to insist on a pink craft for Valentine's Day instead of just cutting up any old color of paper.

We started the day with the Pinterest-tradional pink heart-shaped pancakes and heart-shaped strawberries.  Then I made dinner (best idea ever by the way, make dinner before the crying hour of 5 pm), did the dishes, cleaned the house and got all things ready to leave for a play date.

Went to said play date after only getting a little stuck in the few inches of remaining, yet melting snow.  Then to Wal-Mart to get some last minutes supplies for our afternoon activity and holy cow was it crazy.  People had all sorts of un-necessary things to buy after being hulled up for two days.  (I had paint pens and toys in my cart, so really shouldn't be judging).  It was like Christmas, minus the Christmas part.

We got home and the kids did an art project--paint pens on ceramic plates.  Like the Sharpie on a mug craft you've seen on Pinterest, only I went straight for the paint pens because they work, unlike every comment I read on various blogs that the Sharpie just washes off.  While the kids did that, I made a cheesecake--I know I'm awesome right.  And while it didn't really have enough time to cool before we ate some, it was/is awesome.  Seriously, first thing I did right all week.

Alice as Hitler

Rex's plate

Alice's

threw this one in for fun--Alice's favorite hiding place--between the counter and the deep freeze.

Figuring out how to make cheesecake is not going to be good for my butt 

And then we had dinner.  Heart-shaped meatloaf because I'm so cute.  But really it looked like a red...well, you look at the picture and see if you're thinking the same thing I'm thinking.

Then bath and bed for the kids.

Next, I decided to do an at-home-date for Valentine's Day, because, let's face it, going out when you have kids is hard.  First you have to find a sitter, which means remembering to call one after school and hoping they'll answer and blah blah blah.  It's a pain.  So you get the sitter.  But then the day arrives and you have  twice as much work as usual getting ready for the sitter, because you still have to make dinner for the kids or at least write out detailed instructions of where everything is in the kitchen so the sitter can make dinner.  Then you have to clean up because you don't want the sitter to judge you and even if you don't care about that, you're pretty sure your kids are going to go crazy once you leave and pull out at least 10 more buckets of toys, so you want to start as close to clean as possible.  Then you have to look cute.  I mean, really, it's a date and it's not often that you leave the house with out kids so you should probably at least wear clean clothes.  And then, if you live where I live, you have to plan at least 40 minutes to pick the sitter up--20 minutes to her house, and 20 back.  So basically, I just spent my entire day getting ready for the date.  Then you go on the date and it's only like 2 hours because 1. you are paying the sitter and 2. she needs to get home and 3. you still have 40 minutes of driving to drop her off.  So you drop her off and by now it's like 10 o'clock and you still have to do the dishes from the kids' dinner and clean up their toys.  Most sitters will at least attempt at these last two things, but they don't really know where stuff goes and you didn't pay them that much anyway.  So you have now spent from 3 o'clock to 11 o'clock getting ready for/cleaning up after a 2 hour date.

I decided to ditch all that and planned a stay-at-home date instead and will probably repeat a lot in the coming weeks.

After experimenting with the kids' plates earlier in the day, Greg and I also made plates.  It wasn't what I normally think of as a date (did you not read the above paragraph?), but I still got some cheesecake (why Mom did you deprived me of it's goodness my whole life?) and got to spend time talking with Gregory and laughing at his ridiculousness, which is really all a date is right?  Time talking together and not just sitting in the same room as each other, which is what we are doing right now.

Greg's--Happy Valentine's Day to you too.

Greg says I'm a narcissist because I wrote "I love you" on my own plate.

So we had a lovely Valentine's.  Now onto Greg and Rex's birthdays, St. Patrick's Day, which I accidentally made a big deal at our house, oh, yeah, and I'm supposed to have a baby sometime...