Valentine's Day Weekend

Valentine's started early this year, as it always does, with a Valentine's packages from my parents for the kids. 

The first package was a Valentine book for everyone.

Leah wasted no time using her activity and color book.

The second package was a lot of good candy for everyone.  We love packages!

All 4 of the big kids had Valentines to take to school this year.  We had lots of prepping to get all of them done.  Chloe, for the first time, handmade all of her Valentines for her class.  I failed to get a picture of them, but she used some Valentine themed stencils that my mom sent and taped some candy cane Hershey kisses to the card.  They were very cute.

Mitch was very excited to write all of his classmates names on his Avenger Valentines.  It took quite awhile, but he got the job done and did a great job.

The twins were excited for their Starburst Valentines.  I wrote all of their classmates' names and the girls signed their own names.  

Leah was hilarious and mixed up the letters of her name.  Most of the time I think she knows the order, but both girls struggle with saving enough room to write their entire name without running out of space.

Leah, as short as her name is, had a really hard time with this.  It resulted in her name transforming to many different alternative names.

"Hale" was my favorite of all the variations.

At least she got all of the correct letters in there. Hleah could be pronounced "Hu-lee" and be kind of cute.

Leha could be "Lee-ha."  (Just think Yee-haw!)

I came down Valentine's morning to make the kids a hot breakfast.  I heard some scurrying and one of the kids yelled, "She's coming!"

The kids had made me breakfast.  It was so sweet.  They had made oatmeal, a raisin bagel, set out a peach greek yogurt, a glass of water, and the orange bowl had some candy hearts in it.

I made them heart shaped, pink pancakes.

For their lunches, I made their sandwiches heart shaped and packed them a few treats.  The kids make their own lunches 95% of the time, so just me making their lunches was a treat.

The girls had a friend over that morning.  I came down and found them playing Mario Kart together. 

Later, we met up with Ben for a lunch with my Valentine.  We found the BEST Chinese place-it's the best Chinese food I've ever had.  This orange peel chicken was amazing.

The card I digitally got for Ben (sent via text message). :)

These two pink ladies helped me make our traditional heart shaped sugar cookies.

I made a big one for everyone.

The big kids came home with LOTS of Valentines.  I was super impressed by all of the handmade Valentines they had that were really cute.

The twins had their Valentine party the day before at preschool and came home and made an equally big mess of all of their cards and treats.

Our traditional heart shaped pizza!

While out running errands, I got everyone a small, inexpensive gift- Seahawk stuff!  We still have the fever here.  Except Chloe- she got a wonder loom.  They are all the craze right now.  

Our best Valentine treat was having our cousins come up that night.  Ben's sister Megan and her family came for the long weekend.

Mitch is always glad for another boy in the house to play with.  He and Sam had lots of fun wrestling, watching movies and irritating the girls.

Saturday afternoon, we headed to the Pacific Science Center.  The 3 little girls fell asleep on the ride up.

We actually had all 6 girls in our car.  We love girls at our house!

The butterfly garden is one of our favorite things there.

The moms and the 10 kids in front of the Science Center.  The Space Needle is so cool at night.

I couldn't resist snapping pictures of the two sweet babies all weekend long.  Their big sisters are such good helpers with them.

These two sweet things are only 5 weeks apart- the closest Andros grand babies in age.

Aren't they sweet?

Twinner carseats!  These carseats were my twins' carseats.  After they outgrew them, I lent one of them to Ben's sisters.  Grant is the 4th baby to use that seat- talk about getting good use out of something.

This picture shows it a little- they are both redheads and I love it! Red and Redder, I call them.  Grant is Redder for sure.  Liv's new hair is coming in much lighter then her original dark red patch.

We had such a great weekend with the Williams family.  The kids had a blast just playing together all day long.  We were selfishly glad when the mountain pass closed down on Monday due to terribly snowy weather and they had to stay an extra day/night.  

After they left Tuesday morning, I found this sweet note on our whiteboard, written by Stella.

On Valentine's Day, our family all reminisced to last year on Valentine's Day:

That was when we told the kids that we were pregnant!

We are so glad that our sweet little Valentine is here with us this year.  We LOVE her!  (And I love not being pregnant and sick this year).