Valentines Day 2012!

Our Valentines Day was a little different this year.  I have a feeling it is just preparing us for the coming years…  Elleigh has been gone a lot with basketball playoffs (which is still going on) and Meat Judging (which we have a couple of months left).  Last weekend was her first competition and their team scored 3rd!  This past weekends she improved greatly and their team got 1st!  The team consists of 3 members who are returning from last year and who won 1st in the Nation and her SO lots of pressure on her as the new girl but she is working hard at it.  Of course she loves traveling, staying in hotels, and eating at good restaurants!!!  I joke that she went in and asked if they had an extra-curricular activity that provided all those and she was sold!!!  All of that to say we had to adjust our V-Day plans.  We were not able to do our traditional breakfast but we did do a nice dinner on another night.

We made these heart shaped crayons for Sallie and Lizzie’s classes at school and for Millie’s Cubbies Class at church.  This was much more work than I had imagined but I thought they turned out cute.  If I had to do it over, I would print something to attach the crayons to as opposed to cutting all those circles and writing on them.  I have intended to make this cake for A since right before he left for Africa and never did so I finally made if for our Valentine’s Dinner.  It is called Cappaccino Cake and it was SO GOOD!!!  I think this is his new favorite cake!  I decided after it was too late that the plating would have been really pretty with a strawberry or chocolate covered strawberry on the plate.  Maybe next time!This year A got the girls teacups in Africa!  They were hand painted there and I love them so much!  So special…I just realized when I looked at this pic that Ell has not been on the blog since her hair color change.  She decided several months ago to not color her hair and let it go to her natural color which is brown according to her roots but we began coloring it when it turned from blonde to light brown so not sure exactly what color it would be.  The line where the blonde was fading was looking kinda bad so our hair stylist suggested putting a temporary color on it that matched her roots so that she did not have that line while the color was growing out.  I really had a hard time letting go of the blonde.  My “little girl” is blonde, even if it did come from a bottle the last couple of years!  But, some battles just aren’t for fighting (at least not too much!).  It really is growing on me.  However, I think she got it out of her system and wants to be blonde again!  I told her she had to live with this a while longer!  We’ll see!A thought the cake was so good that he needed to lick the plate!Sallie thought Daddy had a great idea!We did not have our traditional Valentines Breakfast BUT Saturday morning the girls (minus Ell who was out of town) insisted we have heart pancakes!  They love tradition as much as us!