Little Holidays Equals Big Deal

I hope you all had a nice Valentines Day.  Part of my happiness Project is to make a bigger deal out of the small holidays.  I've never really been big on decorating my house for holidays, except Christmas, and even Christmas isn't decorated on a large scale.  So this Valentines Day, I did a little more than help the girls sign their Valentine Day cards.  I decorated!

I love paint chip cards.  You can do almost anything with them.  I wrote a couple articles for Yahoo! on different crafts you can do with them.  You can check one of them out here:  Creative Crafts with Paint Chip Cards.

So, I cut out a million hearts out of all the different shades of red and pink and made them into a garland for our mantel.  The girls made Valentine Guys out of plastic cups.

My girls have been ruthless to each other lately.  I'm sure it's cabin fever and lack of fresh air, so I found this craft in Family Fun magazine.  I thought it would be a great way for the girls to write nice notes and valentines to each other.

I made a felt envelope for everyone on the back of our kitchen chairs:  Mom, Dad, Marcella and Ellen.  Even Adyson and Camden (our grandchildren) got one too because they are here everyday.  Ellen enjoyed helping Adyson scribble on papers and "deliver" them to the appropriate envelope.  It was a nice change of pace with giving someone something for a holiday and it not having to come from a store.

Since the girls didn't have school on Friday which was Valentines Day, and Jeff had to work, we celebrated on Thursday.  The kids had no idea when they woke up and found this:

 And pink heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast!

Of course, my girls are "Frozen" stricken like everyone else and about a month or so ago, I found Elsa dolls in her ice princess dress and nabbed two right away.  I knew they would be hard to find if I had waited.  Sure enough, I have yet to find hardly anything Elsa in the stores.  So the girls got their Elsa dolls, too.

It was the highlight of their day... Then they had to go get ready for school.  Ha!

It felt like a big holiday on what has always been "just another day", replaced with happy chattering, "thank yous", eating and excitement.  The envelopes were a big hit.

Even Camden got Valentines!

Now I'm looking forward to St. Patrick's Day.  I'll be back at Home Depot nabbing up all the green paint chip cards to make a shamrock garland and scheming up a pretty breakfast table with green pancakes, of course!

Oh, and in case you're wondering what happened to our colored ice balls, we found them just before it snowed some more.  What an interesting discovery we found....




















The food coloring had leaked out of the ice balls and onto the snow around the balls.  Even though the balls are still there, we now have some very pretty colorful snow in our backyard!














And one last thing, my newest picture won an award on Pixoto (in only 2 days!).  When I took the girls sledding the other day, I didn't realize we were in the wrong section and we were walking on the golf course.  It was the most beautiful sight, with smooth snow and no footprints.  I took a very quick picture with my phone and this is what I got:

Here are a couple others I got:

Happy Valentines Day!!!