Minute to Win it (Valentine Style)

The day before Valentine's Day we prepared with a friendly Family Home Evening competition.

We played "Minute to Win it" games, but Valentine style.  

The first of our games was to see who could stack conversation hearts the highest.  If your stack fell over, you had to start over and who ever had the highest stack at the end of one minute, won.  It was boys against girls.  It wasn't hard for the girls to beat the boys since they had nothing but a collapsed stack at the end of one minute!

Next up was to see who could move the most red pom poms from one bowl to the other using nothing but their noses and Vaseline.  Karsyn was the grand champion of that game.

 The next game was my favorite...to watch!  The kids each had a heart-shaped Reeses Peanut Butter Heart that they had to get from their forehead into their mouths without touching it.  The combination of watching what they did with their faces to make the candy move and the melted chocolate trail it left down their faces was priceless!

 Cassidy turned out to be the grand champion of the Chocolate Candy game.  And she not only proved herself by doing it once, but twice!

 The last game we did was to see who could pick up and place in a cup the most conversation hearts using two valentine pencils.  I love that the kids were so in to it all that they didn't even want to clean off their faces from the game before.

 And it turns out that mom has pretty good eye-hand coordination cause no one could beat me in this game!

Then it was time to make the school valentines to pass out the next day.  I refuse to send the kids to school with store-bought valentines and I think the kids have really enjoyed making them each year.  They take great pride in coming home Valentine's Day and telling me that their Valentine's were the best and are usually the only hand-made ones from their class.  Only the boys made valentines since they are the only ones left in Elementary school where they still pass them out.  I let them both look at several ideas I had found for them and then choose which one they wanted to do.  Will chose to make super-hero suckers that said "I hope you have a SUPER Valentine's Day".  But then he wanted to make an extra-special one for the girl he likes right now.

So besides the Super sucker, she got a little box of cereal with a note that said, "I cereal-sly like you".

 Layton chose to do another photo valentine but with a snicker's candy bar and the saying, "You always make me SNICKER".  Then not to be out done by his little brother, Layton put 3 snickers on the valentine for the girl that he likes!

 I had just bought myself a new water bottle from Costco and my kids were going crazy for it!  Apparently, everyone that is anyone has one of these and they were all trying to buy it from me!
So I had one for each kid waiting on them when they got home from school that day, full of candy.

I gave Scott a copy of our book we made from our Isreal/Egypt trip we took in 2009 and a water bottle  (didn't want him to feel left out of the "in" crowd).  But my favorite was this little memo- frame I made to put in our bedroom.  It says, "I love you because..."  This has been a really fun way for us to leave each other little love notes.

And of course, I couldn't forget about Kennedy!  I sent her a box of See's chocolate, but replaced all the yucky ones that no one eats, with different denominations of money.

I also gave her the perfect man for Valentine's Day.  He is strong yet quiet and solid chocolate!

Then Scott sent her rose to her in chocolate form as well this year.

 Keeping with tradition, Scott showed up that night with flowers for his girls.  I never got a photo of Cassidy and Scott since she was at dance practice when he brought them him and then we were off on a hot date when she got home!

 We went out for a really nice 4 course dinner at Applewood and then to a romantic movie called "The Vow".  It was a perfect Valentine's with fun, food, surprises and chocolate!