Gracen and I had a jammed-packed fun-filled Valentine’s Day today and it all started out like this.
With heart-shaped pancakes, strawberry slices, and fresh whipped cream. Gracen was in heaven.
After breakfast, Grae opened her little Valentine’s Day bag from Bradley and I.
Inside she found a new photo book called Gracen Loves…
A pretty little shirt (that she helped pick out last week)…
And a new set of felt hair clips made with love by Mama.
With the help of her Papa, she got dressed and ready for the day while I zipped around the house doing a few last minute things for the tea.
This morning when she woke up Papa for breakfast, she marched into the bedroom and proudly presented Bradley with this card she made. (From the bottom of my heart…)
(To the tips of my toes… I love YOU!)
And before he left for work, Grae snuggled in closely and they danced around the living room for a few minutes. ♥
Before her guests arrived, Gracen tested out the mess-free finger paint station we set up on the front window.
After a wonderfully busy (and slightly crazy) Valentine’s tea (separate post to come) and a much needed nap, Grae had an afternoon snack of strawberries and fresh whipped cream.
And then we headed to the park to get some fresh air and enjoy the day’s last hour of sunshine.
When we got home, my sous chef and I started working on dinner.
This little lady loves helping in the kitchen. Not to mention that having her cook with me has solved our recent “witching hour” dinner making disasters.
For Mama and Grae – chicken, sundried tomato, roasted garlic, and feta pizza. (I’m embarrassed to say that Grae ate 5 – yes, FIVE – mini heart-shaped pizzas at her little party today and I had already planned pizza for dinner too. BIG helping of steamed green veggies needed on the side!)
And for Papa – prosciutto and caramelized onion pizza.
And if we hadn’t overdone the heart thing yet, heart-shaped bananas for dessert.
Overall, a wonderful day with my little valentine. ♥
In preparation for Little G’s Valentine’s Day tea, this morning we experimented with making our own finger paint. I found the 
Gracen carefully added all of our ingredients into a large measuring cup first…
And then enthusiastically mixed it up!
Then we warmed the mixture on the stove…
Separated it into small bowls, added a few drops of food colouring, and stirred it well. It looks pretty, right?
Today we spent our afternoon doing a bunch of little art projects for Valentine’s Day.
Gracen happily drew a “picture” on the back of each of her little friends’ cards.
All we have to do tomorrow is attach the 
Our next project involved punching out hundreds of little paint chip hearts… Technically Grae wasn’t the one doing the punching, but she was a great assistant.
Her real job was getting each little heart into this container for safe keeping. Of course this job was right up her alley because it involved transferring objects from one place to another. Little weirdo.
And while all those paper hearts kept Miss G busy, I worked on some Valentine’s Day hair clips for Grae and her little cousin, Kinslee.
Our last project of the afternoon involved a wax / watercolour resist. First, Gracen scribbled all over white card stock with white crayons…
Then we cut out a bunch of hearts, taped them down to some plastic, and painted them using homemade watercolours.
It took a minute for Grae to really get into the painting part (at first she was squeezing and shaking the paint out of the brush), but once she got the idea, she went for it.
Tada! Another masterpiece by Miss G. :) We’ll let them dry overnight and tomorrow she’ll hang them up on her bedroom door. And just in time. Only 3 days left!
Now the project actually calls for old broken crayon chunks, but since our collection wasn’t large enough yet, we supplemented with some new crayons too. Gracen was an excellent paper peeler.
She was also in charge of breaking the crayons into chunks.
Then I helped by chopping them up into smaller chunks with a knife.
Then we stuffed our heart shaped mold as full as it could be.
We popped the whole thing into a warm oven…
And watched the crayons slowly melt.
And before long, it was time to take them out.
We let them cool a while and then popped them out of the molds.
Presto! Heart-shaped crayons. Very simple, but made with love. Tomorrow we’ll work on the cards to attach them to…
Gracen absolutely adores the little colouring book we made for her ‘Christmas in January’ stocking. She loves pointing out her family members and having me tell her about what’s happening in the pictures. We’ve already coloured 4 pages today, and it’s still morning!
All we did was take some of our favourite photos of her and her cousins, pop them into Photoshop, and turn them into line drawings rather than photos. Then I printed them all on card stock, bound them, and that was it!
Here’s my cool girl helping her Mama with grocery shopping.
This is my all time favourite picture of Grae and her cousin, Kinslee, who is exactly 6 weeks younger than her.
Of course, her cousin, ‘SuperChay’, had to be in the colouring book.
And here’s one of her cousin Korbin’s pages.
The best part is that while we colour, we can talk about all the fun memories that fill the pages. This photo was taken when Grae’s cousins came to visit us in Vernon and we all visited the pool for Chayton’s birthday. I have a feeling these little colouring books will become a yearly tradition in our family. :)
Today’s activities included quietly emptying an entire row of books from her bookshelf…
And happily drawing on her new chalkboard for a really long time. :)
Well, this project has been a long time in the making (we started just after Halloween), but we finally finished making this year’s Christmas cards. Miss G was a trooper, but I’m not going to lie… I may have been a little ambitious when I decided that Grae would stamp each of the cards with 10 or more of her sweet little fingerprints.
Either way, they’re done! We’ll head out this afternoon so that Grae can deposit each of the 30 envelopes in the mailbox one at a time. :)
Today Gracen and I used my old trusty recipe and whipped up a batch of play dough. Despite getting flour EVERYWHERE, she was a fantastic kitchen helper. She even picked her own colour – this marvellous shade of puke green. Although it might not have been my first colour choice, she loooooved the finished product and happily poked (okay, more like stabbed) at her play dough pancakes for a good long while before wanting to move on to something else.