With Valentines Day here again, one thing I like about the girls is their enthusiasm about things like Valentines Day.  They both dressed special for the day.  Molly wanted to wear all pink, and I mean all pink.  Claire had been saving up a special red shirt with a heart on it for today.  She did not wear all pink or red, but she did wear pink shoes.  There is absolutely no cynicism or irony here.  The girls still just love to dress up in as much of a Valentines theme as possible.  This is one of the great things about their age.

We spent last night scrambling to finish the girls’ Valentines cards to give to their schoolmates.  Molly decided to do handmade cut-out hearts decorated with stickers and glitter.  She skipped the glitter due to some, uh, issues we had with glitter in the recent past.  Glitter does not clean up easily.  Molly had been working on her Valentines for a few days now.  She thought she was done after she did about four of them a few days ago.  She was surprised there were more to do.  So we set up an assembly line where I cut out hearts and wrote the “to” part, then Molly added stickers and scrawled her name “MOLLY” at odd angles near the “from” part .  Claire started slowly a few days ago, putting off the Valentines project, but got busy as the big day approached and finished up last night by herself with no problem.  She gave out pre-made Valentines cards with heart-shaped lollipops (my long-running fight with distributing Valentines candy is basically over).  She wrote a special note to her top six or seven closest friends.

I made a heart-themed dinner featuring strawberries in new heart-shaped ceramic bowls for the girls and heart-accented pot pies from Whole Foods for Kit and me.  The girls came home from school with a load of candy from their friends, and now we must battle through yet another holiday sugar influx.  The girls were so full of candy that they didn’t even want the tiny heart-shaped cake we had ready for dessert.  We’ll start up on the usual standard of two candies per day tomorrow!