Love Notes

Each year our family begins the month of February by decorating the living room with cardboard and cardstock glitter hearts and after dinner each night, we write little love notes to each other. Last year we each wrote a love note to each member of the family every evening, but this year we decided to change it up a bit and we have made it more into a game. One person gets to start and they write a note to someone and when they're finished, everyone closes their eyes and they pop their note into the recipients mail box and then we all check to see who the lucky recipient is. Then that person chooses someone to write a love note to, and so the game continues until everyone has a love note. The kids are still young enough to be filled with anticipation as they wait to see who will receive a love note next…

Then, on Valentine’s Day, we each have a mailbox filled with heartfelt, handwritten love notes. It’s just a fun way for the family to interact as well as a way of trying to take the commercialization out of Valentine’s Day for the most part. I’m not saying that if a certain person wanted to buy his wife some diamond earrings as an expression of love, that that would not be totally okay, but otherwise (and since that will not be happening any time soon), its all about the “gifts from the heart” theme around here.

For dinner I made stew in the crock pot and my husband could not believe his eyes and (his nose) when he arrived home last night to discover that dinner had already been made. Over dinner we realized that we have owned the crock pot for well over 10 years and have never used it and we were wondering what on earth had possessed us to buy one in the first place. This was followed by my husband wondering what on earth had possessed me to suddenly bring the thing out and made a stew with it! But that’s just my style…total randomness and always some element of surprise…

I served the stew in bread bowls and the dinner was a huge hit. For dessert, I made Bakerella’s Peach Crunch Cake. Let me say, it was as if she concocted this recipe just for me – it is totally foolproof which is exactly what I need, judging from my near disasters here and here. My photos do not do the dessert justice, see hers here.