Valentine's Day and a Spot of February Sun

 As far as I'm concerned, holidays are a chance for me to torture Liam (and sometimes myself) with holiday traditions from my childhood:) I LOVE tradition. And for Valentines Day, the tradition is Valentine sugar cookies and making Valentines.  Even before Liam was born I would make cookies every year and force Dan to pretend to have fun while helping me decorate them. He's actually always been a really good sport. But I think he was totally okay with Liam taking over the reigns this time. In fact, I decided to really torture myself this year and have a Valentine party with Liam's friends.

So, naturally Liam was dying to make a homemade Valentine for every single one of his friends that we invited. Is that what happened....or was it my idea? Hmmmmm. Yes, my idea. He was over it pretty quickly, and I was practically bribing him to color and glue something on each one. The main problem was that he was being artistically difficult. I had cut out dozens of tiny hearts and I had several stickers to choose from. But he was not satisfied. "Kate doesn't like any of these colors, she only likes black." So I searched to the bottom of my paper pile and found a patterned paper with a little black on it. "Kate doesn't like hearts, she only wants a star." This went on for a LONG time. The results, however, were beautiful. And all of the two year olds fully appreciated the hours of labor and love that went into making them. In fact, one of his friends tore his up before even seeing the front of it! Totally worth the effort:)

The cookies were a BIG hit though. I stayed up the night before and made something like 8 or 9 dozen heart shaped cookies. Liam was more than happy to slip under my radar and watch TV. He did come help occasionally.

The party was actually really fun. The mom's frosted all of the cookies...I at least knew better than to give 8 plus two year olds access to frosting. Then the kids had fun stuffing as much candy as they could fit onto each cookie. They decorated, ran circles, played with toys, ran in circles, watched TV, ran in circles, hugged and kissed, and ran in more circles. It was pretty wild, but lots of fun.

Here we have Liam with a few of his guests.

Here we have Liam trying to kiss a few of his guests.

Here we have the aftermath. Let me assure you it was much worse than it looks. The camera didn't capture the pink frosting crusted to every surface in the kitchen, or the sprinkles and candy littered ALL over the floor, on chairs, under the table, the crumbs, the half eaten cookies left as surprises around every corner. It was a SIGHT! But surprisingly pretty quick to clean up. And Liam had an absolute blast. All in all, mostly worth it!

On a side note, after weeks of rain and gray, we got a few chance days of beautiful sun!!! When the sun comes out in Vancouver during the winter, you drop everything and run for the door, even if you know it's about to go behind a cloud three minutes later. We went for lots of walks. Dan was even home one of the days so we went out for a walk in the forest by our house.

There is nothing more beautiful than a sunny Vancouver. Here's to hoping for Summer to come soon!