happy Saint Valentine's Day to you

The work of Valentines is all about love, glue, cardstock, chocolate, sweet confections, flowers. This year, we managed to hit all the notes. Friday I was caught! No lace doilies, no red construction paper, no glitter! So we did it a bit different, and water colors, water -color paper, cardstock, glue and a pack of alphabet stamps later, we had our very own gorgeous Valentines.

Magdalena did each step of hers herself, the hearts, how she drew on them and decorated them, cutting them out, and designing her cards and gluing them together and they are stellar. I drew the hearts on water color paper for Frida and Augustus, they painted what they wanted - Augustus filled in every square millimeter, Frida doodled and did light gorgeous painting - then I cut out the hearts and they designed and glued them on. We don't have a shot of Frida's, but you can imagine them from her watery-blue painting, they turned out luminous and lovely. Inside, using letter stamps, they put their messages of Valentine love.

My Valentines came a day early, from my hard-working man. He came home early, we were all a-twitter, and he went back out to the van, returned bearing gifts - classic, Valentines bring-home-to-the-wife gifts, crazy beautiful arranged flowers in a speckled pink glass vase and our favorite box 'o chocolates from a local chocolatier. The chocolates were gone in a short order frenzy, and the flowers are just getting more beautiful as the flowers open more. Jeanna came over today and said, "oh my God! Look at your flowers!"

(notice, in the bottom photo, under the fern, a tiny Our Lady of La Leche statue, from my mom! I just had to sneak her in there. She brought her to me after she visited the shrine, she said Our Lady's dedication to motherhood reminded her of me. Ok, I'm faclempt, talk amongst yourselves.)

Today we were dedicated to the task of making our Valentines celebration of love and sugar complete with chocolate covered strawberries (Florida winter strawberries, from Plant City, are really some of the yummiest strawberries on the planet, except maybe for some summer strawberries I had in Vermont many years ago). And while I was busy in the kitchen putting together the cake, so I have no photos of the process, the children did these strawberries under Tita's watchful eye. They turned out so perfect, and the babes had a ball doing them, so proud they were of their handiwork they even waited until they had finished cooling off in the fridge before devouring them. Of course the evening was to be topped off by the yummy buttermilk heart-shaped cake with a beet-juice pink cream cheese frosting, lightly sprinkled with red sugar, homemade vanilla ice cream and homemade chocolate sauce but we were thwarted. At 7pm my man got a work call, 7pm on a Valentine's day Saturday. Sigh. Life calls. Anyhoo, the children are in bed, he should be home soon, and we'll have a late night dessert, together.

Happy Saint Valentine's Day to you all.