Happy Snowy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

All Things Valentine's Day

I have written a ton about Valentine's Day over the years, so in case you've missed any of them the first time around here they are:

The Easiest Homemade Valentine Ever - honestly, the easiest.

More Ideas for Homemade Valentines - Play Doh, recycled crayons, and good ol rocks.

Snowy Valentine's Day Scavenger Hunt - so fun, but remember, you need snow.

Make Strawberry Hearts - holiday fun and healthy, too!

Heart-Shaped Potatoes - because do you love your kids, or not?

Valentine's Day Cookies that WOW - trust me, these will be a hit.

All About Suffragette Postcards - I know it's most likely that you don't care about the suffrage movement, but if you do... it has cool ties to Valentine's Day. You can see more here, too.

I know that many a kid brings in a homemade Valentine, but your time and sanity are worth something, so let me recommend a few great picks for store-bought - and fabulous - class Valentines.

Peaceable Kingdom - has so many fantastic options from scratch-n-sniff sticker Valentines to Owl bookmark cards.

eeBoo - has two awesome choices, animals and fairies, and includes teacher cards, too.

Paper Magic - has very cool paper airplane Valentines and Mad Libs Valentines.


Okay. so who's ready to celebrate Valentine's Day!

Sweetest Valentine Ever

Last year, my essay A Pinterest Perfect Mom, I am Not was included in the humor anthology I Just Want to Pee Alone. The essay was about how the year before I saw this idea on Pinterest about decorating your kids' bedroom doors with hearts filled with sweet saying for Valentine's Day.

I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so late into the night I wrote "You're so good at singing loudly all of Taylor Swift's songs!" and "I love it when you wake-up at 5am! More time to spend together!"

Then even later into the night I taped those hearts all over their doors. And then re-taped them when they fell down, all the time reminding myself that it was going to be worth it - so worth it - when they saw them Valentine's Day morning!

On Valentine's Day morning the children not only did not appreciate my "heart attack," they mocked it. Relentlessly. And then they made fun of all the stupid heart stuff I made them for breakfast.
So last year, when Valentine's Day rolled around, of course I didn't do it again. For breakfast there were no heart shaped potatoes, no eggs in heart shaped bread with a side of heart-shaped strawberries. Sure, there were waffles with red and pink sprinkles - I don't hate happiness, but it wasn't all over the top like the previous year's celebration.

So you can imagine my surprise when the kids asked me "Where are the hearts on our bedroom doors? Where are the heart pancakes?"

"What?" I replied, shocked. "You hated all that! So I didn't do it again... wait, you mean you didn't hate it?'

"No!" The kids screamed, "We loved it!"

Huh. I honestly had no idea.

Then, this year, the greatest thing happened. When I woke-up Valentine's Day morning, the kids had decorated my room with hearts! And Kay even made a scavenger hunt with a different gift waiting for each of us when we reached the end. It was absolutely the best Valentine's Day ever.
Sadly, Dad was away and didn't get to be part of the fun. So Kay made this perfect card for him.

In case you're worried Kay's father is stationed overseas or on an extended archeological dig, he is neither. He is away on a 56 hour business trip, but to Kay, his absence must have seemed much longer.

Next year, I'll have to head back to Pinterest to find something really good for those kids....

Happy Valentine's Day!

Springerle - Valentine's Day Cookies with WOW

Do you want to be the THAT mom at the class Valentine's Day party?

Of course you do.

Then bring these cookies:

I'm actually not that mom. But my mom is, so she made these cookies for us.

If you also want to make them, here's how:

• Purchase a heart shaped cookie mold here.
• Follow the recipe for Perfection Springerle Cookies here. (Or the gluten-free recipe here.)
• Enjoy for months to come! Seriously - these cookies stay good for 2-3 months.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Suffragette Valentine's Day!

This post is a re-publish from 2011, because if there's one thing the Internet doesn't have enough of, it's historical information about the suffragette movement.


I am a big collector of all sorts of things. Useful things, like used milk caps. 

I also like to collect old postcards. They arrive to my (and my husband's!) delight neatly boxed-up from eBay on a regular basis. Sometimes, I purchase postcards directly from among the decaying remains of a lifetime in a house sale or more macabrely, from an estate sale.

Some of my favorite postcards are the ones that are both pro and con women's suffrage. For those of you who like a little history lesson with your blog reading, the women's suffrage movement in the United States was active in the early twentieth century, until voting rights were finally secured in 1920 after a long and contentious battle.

The U.S. suffragettes were a clever group, as were the equally fascinating anti-suffragettes. The arguments from both sides are still very much alive today via the slogans of the many postcards used to promote each side's position. Today, these same goals are accomplished with emails and witty tweets.

I have an endlessly amusing collection of postcards from both sides of the debate, and only recently realized a few of them are Valentine's Day related.  I'm not sure why the holiday-tie-in, but as I also have Mother's Day and Thanksgiving Day suffragette post cards I'm guessing they took advantage of all the holidays to spread their message.

Here is one of my most favorite Valentines Day anti-suffrage cards.  It reads "Woman's sphere is in the home."

And although she's entirely on the wrong side of the debate, there's still something so captivating about the quilter pictured here. The photo doesn't really show it, but that's a real red ribbon winding around the bottom of her skirt, and tiny silver beads around her quilt. Clearly, the anti-suffragettes weren't messing around when it came to showing their superior crafting skills while being in their place at home.



If you want to see additional vintage and suffragette Valentines, don't worry, I have more! Just click here.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

And if you're looking for a quick-and-easy homemade Valentine, this one is great!

All you need is:

• construction paper
• writing utensil - marker, puffy glue, crayon, pencil
• scissors

Fold the construction paper in half so it's easy to make a symmetrical heart, and cut it out. Then, just draw an eye, and add a "U." I was lucky enough to have googly eyes so I stuck one of those on for the eye, but a hand-drawn one would be just as nice.

I made these with my little guy for him to give to his big sisters tomorrow, and we are also going to leave a pile of red balloons in their rooms to surprise them in the morning. He has promised to get up super-early to make sure we can do this before they wake-up, and I have assured him that I'm not worried, I'm also sure he will. Like you-always-wake-up-at-5am sure.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Perfect Valentine's Day Treats for the Classroom - Gluten and Nut Free!

Valentine's Day is next week, which means I'm not thinking about what wonderful thing my beloved will be getting me, no I'm thinking about what I'm going to make for the class party at my kid's school.

 

Luckily, right as I was trying to figure out what I could bring, an email appeared from Kings Food Markets with two great options for the classroom, Gluten and Nut Free Rice Crispy Treats and Gluten and Nut Free Lemon Ginger Crisp.  Substitute dairy-free margarine for the butter, and the lactose-intolerant kids can enjoy as well.

 

Thanks to Kings Food Markets for allowing me to reprint these yummy Valentine's Day recipes!

 

Gluten and Nut Free Rice Crispy Treats

Makes 12 two inch squares

1 10 oz box of Gluten-Free Brown Rice Crisp Cereal (Use the entire box.)

8 tablespoons butter (1 stick)

1 10 oz package of marshmallows

1 tsp Gluten Free Vanilla Extract

Procedure:

Grease a 13 x 9 inch pan

 

1.   Melt butter over low heat in a large pan.

2.   Add marshmallows to melted butter and stir over low heat until melted. Remove pan from heat. Stir in vanilla extract.

3.   Stir in rice cereal and gently coat cereal with marshmallow mixture.

4.  Pour rice mixture into prepared pan. With buttered fingers press the mixture flat.

5.   When cool and set, cut into 12 squares.

Gluten and Nut Free Lemon Ginger Crisp

Makes 20 large cookies

12 tbls unsalted butter, room temperature

1 1/2 cups granulated cane sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp lemon extract

2 cups gluten-free all purpose flour mix with xanthan gum

1/2 tsp gluten-free baking powder

1 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp salt

grated zest of 1 lemon

2 oz minced crystallized ginger

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 375°

 

1.Combine softened butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. Cream with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add egg and lemon extract. Beat until combined.

2. In a separate bowl, combine gluten-free all purpose flour, gluten-free baking powder, ground ginger, salt and grated lemon zest. Whisk to thoroughly combine.

3. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Beat on slow and use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl. When the mixture is combined, gradually add the minced ginger to the cookie dough and blend until combined.

4.Make 2 tablespoon balls out of dough for giant cookies. Place no more than 6 on large ungreased cookie sheets. If they are placed too close together they will bake together! If you prefer smaller cookies make 1 tablespoon balls out of dough and place no more than 6 on large cookie sheet.

5. Bake in preheated oven for 10 to 12 minutes or until the cookies are set and the edges are golden brown. Allow to cool on the cookie sheet for at least five minutes before removing with a large spatula to a cooling rack.

 

Do you have other favorite Valentine's Day ideas for classroom parties? Last year I made heart-shaped strawberries, but this year I'll try one of these new recipes from Kings!

 

I was not compensated for this post.

 

For lots more, visit Valentine's Day Ideas on Pinterest.

 

Snow Day Fun: Have an Ice Cube Scavenger Hunt in the Snow

A while back I read about this really cool ice cube scavenger hunt in the snow on Parents.com. With snow in our forecast I decided I would freeze a batch of red hearts for my kids to look for in the snow.

To have an ice cube scavenger hunt in your snowy yard all you need is:



Snow - we used the ones provided by nature, but if you have a snow maker, that would work fine, too.

Frozen Ice Cubes - we have heart shaped muffin trays, which were perfect, but regular ice cube trays are just as good. I used two different colors so each kid could search for their "own" hearts. I added a few drops of food coloring to water in a cup, then poured into the trays and froze.



Good Hiding Skills - while your kids aren't looking, go outside and hide the ice cubes for the scavenger hunt in the snow.



Depending on your kids ages, you might want to make them a map to use to find the ice cube hearts, or you could give them clues or riddles to solve to lead them to the hidden ice cubes.



Warm Clothes to Bundle-up - now go outside and enjoy your snow day ice cube scavenger hunt!

You can find some fun facts about ice to add an educational component to the ice cube scavenger hunt at Go on An Ice Cube Treasure Hunt on NWF.org.



What are your favorite things to do outside with the kids on a snow day?

If you're visiting from Pop Sugar a big hello, welcome and glad you're here!

Be sure to check out more crafts and fun on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter!

And for some serious laughs, check out my husband's grocery list and these reviews of Haribo Sugarless Gummy Bears.

Found (He)art

Happy Valentine's Day

What I'm Thinking About Sunday Night: Ideas (and More Ideas) for Celebrating Valentine's Day with Kids

I went a little overboard this year making heart shaped foods and homemade Valentines in celebration of a holiday, that quite frankly, I don't care about at all. So why then all this Valentine's Day over-consumption?

I blame you, Pinterest. And I am staying far, far away from you, Pinterest for St. Patrick's Day, Cinco De Mayo, and April Fool's Day to make sure this doesn't happen again.

In the meantime, if you're looking for Valentine's Day ideas here are ideas, and more ideas, and then a few more...

5 Easy-to-Make Long-Distance Valentine's Day Cards - These are all easy (at least by Pinterest standards), and you don't need me to tell you how much the grandparents will like receiving them.

Valentine's Day Cards for the Classroom - These amazing homemade Valentine ideas are all easy enough you can make enough for the entire classroom, and I gotta hand it to the Pinterest crafters: you people really are so incredibly creative.

Perfect Printables for Valentine's Day - Ah, printables. The perfect compromise between store-bought and homemade, all you have to do is print these out to share the love with friends and family, or as is just as likely, all your children's classmates.

Glad I Made It: Homemade Valentine's Day Cards - These cards are the handiwork of my very own kids.

Valentine's Day Breakfasts You'll Heart - Easy recipes for making a fun, kid-friendly Valentine's Day breakfast.

How To Make Heart Fried Potatoes in 22 Minutes - These heart fried potatoes are sooo cute, and cutting hundreds of hearts out of raw potatoes is such a good use of time!

Glad I Made It: Strawberry Hearts for Valentine's Day - The heart shaped food obsession continues with heart strawberries.

4 Valentine's Day Books You're Sure to Adore - Picks range from a zombie love-story to the toddler favorite Snuggle Puppy, so really, there's something for everyone.

Fun-Loving Sing-Along Songs for Valentine's Day - Lots of fun tunes to enjoy with the kids on this silly, sappy holiday of hearts and love.

And if you want even more Valentine's Day fun, from last year I've got handprint crafts and a nice collection of vintage suffragette postcards celebrating St. Valentine's Day.

And last, I leave you with the outtakes of all the other foods I have hearted or tried to heart after a night of drinking too much Pinterest.

And last, Scary Mommy has some pretty great Valentines Day cards, too.

Glad I Made It: Homemade Valentine's Day Cards

Due 100% to Pinterest's complete and utter bad influence, I showed my kids ideas for homemade Valentine's Day cards, and let them pick what they wanted to make to give out to their classmates.

Let me fill you in on a little secret that no one tells you when you are enjoying Pinterest in your own crafty mom fantasy land: yours won't look even a little like whatever it is you're eyeing. (This is a lesson I should have remembered from my last Pinterest-inspired bout of creativity. But alas, I did not.)

Luckily for me, my kids are too young to notice (or they're just really, really polite). Here's what we made:

Kay "I sometimes go to first-grade" chose to make Play Doh Valentines. This involved a grown-up printing a circular label to go on top of the Play Doh container (we went with Tic Tac Doh! Be My Valentine!),

adding a heart sticker, and Kay signing her name.

Someone also needed to cut-out the label and affix it to the Play Doh container with a glue dot. This someone was supposed to be the child in my mind, but apparently it was me in her mind, so yes... it is mostly my handiwork.

Making these Play Doh Valentines was totally easy. But making them look good? Not so easy. Here is our Pin-spiration from Random Thoughts of a SUPERMOM!:

And here is our finished product:

With the Play Doh Valentines complete, next up was making Valentines that would be suitable for third-grader "I'm too cool for Valentines" Magpie. Her only criteria was not to include a message that could in any way imply she ever liked anyone at anytime, anywhere or in anyway. Her choice? You Rock! Valentines.

Again, the easy factor on making these classmate Valentine's Day cards is high. I cut out old-school hearts by folding pieces of construction paper in half, and Magpie used a glue dot to affix a rock or two to the heart. And, Magpie even wrote the Valentine's Day greetings all by herself.

I thought they looked pretty great:

But great as they are three-grade handwriting and all, they are nothing like the original Pin-spiration from Fiskars.com:

And last, my two-year-old Ziggy needed Valentines, but just a few. His preschool is Jewish, so there isn't any of that St. Valentine's Day stuff going on there, Baruch Hashem.

I made Ziggy's Valentines for him, using recycled crayon hearts we still had from when we made them last year for Earth Day. The heart crayon-size is just right for toddler hands, and I was happy these Crayon Heart Valentines only took a few minutes to make. Once again I just needed to cut-out a construction paper heart, glue-dot on the heart crayon, add a few stickers and write Happy Valentine's Day!

And while I couldn't be happier with how ours turned out, it sure doesn't compare to the original pin-spiration from WhipperBerry (or to a similar crayon Valentine that has been repinned over 16,000 times).

If you'd like more ideas for homemade Valentines, there are lots more here at Valentines That Make the Grade in the Classroom and on my Valentine's Day Ideas Pinterest Board.

Also? I will never degrade the value of a store-bought Valentine's Day card again.

Glad I Made It: Strawberry Hearts for Valentine's Day

Every since I made heart shaped fried potatoes last week, I've been heart-ing every food I can.

It's gonna be a rude shock to my Kawaii-loving kids when they have to back to go "regular" food once Valentine's Day is over.

While creating most heart-shaped food is based upon using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, you can make strawberry hearts free-form, since they're already pretty much a natural heart.

All you need to do is slice the strawberries in half, and then use a knife to carve a little v out of the top of the strawberry, and you're done.

Here's how our heart strawberries turned out, the kids enjoyed decorating their plates:

Heart fun for everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day!

How to Make Heart Fried Potatoes in 22 Minutes

With Valentine's Day a mere two weeks away, I've been making lots of heart-y crafts with my kids. So it seemed only natural that I would want to make hearty-y food, too.

Here are easy directions for making insane adorable Heart Shaped Fried Potatoes.

1. Go to Pinterest and look at all the insane adorable foods people have carved, kabobed and baked in the shape of hearts and decide you too must do that.

2. Choose to make something with potatoes since you do not have any of the ingredients needed for the other insane adorable ideas, and are too damn lazy to go to the store to get them.

3. Find this amazing recipe for Roasted Potato Hearts and decide to make them for family breakfast.

4. Realize the recipe has too many steps and is way too difficult for someone who only has one iCarly (i.e., 22 minutes) to make the insane adorable heart potatoes and the rest of breakfast.

5. Decide to improvise own almost-as-good heart potato recipe by slicing two potatoes semi-thinly, and then using a cookie cutter to cut out insane adorable hearts from the potatoes.

6. Realize cutting out insane adorable hearts from the potatoes is taking forever (which is way longer than one iCarly episode) and switch to a larger heart shaped cookie cutter.

7. Cut out one insane adorable larger heart potato.

8. Accept that even with this major improvement to the insane adorable heart-cutting out process, it is still going to take longer than you are willing to spend cutting out insane adorable heart potatoes. Especially when you are but one mother with seven remaining minutes, and who still has to make the rest of breakfast.

9. Heat oil in a heavy skillet, and fry the pan-full of insane adorable potato hearts you have managed to cut-out in the preceding fifteen minutes of your life that you are never going to get back.

10. Flip the potato hearts, and serve on platter alongside other regular non-heart breakfast foods.

11. Listen to the kids happily exclaim that there are hearts for breakfast! and decide it really wasn't so much work after all.

12. Vow to make even more and better insane adorable heart food next time!

You can see more insane adorable heart shaped food on my Pinterest Board Heart Food for Valentine's Day.

I've also put all the photos together here, because the other recipes on Pinterest look like this, and I so want to fit-in.

Happy Valentine's Day! Google and I think alike...

With LOVE from New York City

Above: My Valentine's Greeting
Below: Google's Valentine's Greeting

Google.com

Happy Vintage Postcard Valentine's Day!

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that one of my women's suffrage (actually, anti-suffrage) postcards had St. Valentine's Greetings written in tiny print in the corner.

This Valentines Day postcard got me wondering if there were also other ones with a holiday greeting. And if so, why?

A quick online search revealed that postcards were often used as greeting cards back in the early 1900s.  Without email (the horror) or widespread phones even, greeting cards and postcards were one of the most effective ways to get the word out about your favorite cause, which for many was for or against women's suffrage.

Here are a few of my favorite suffrage, anti-suffrage, and vintage feminist Valentine's Day cards:




Image from AuthenticHistory.com



Image from Femulate




Image from the Postcard Museum



Happy Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day - Celebrate with Fun Cards, Cute Handprint Crafts and Rose Scented Cupcakes!

Valentine's Day will be here in just a few days, which makes this the perfect time for making cards, doing handprint crafts with kids, and eating yummy cupcakes.

I just found a terrific design/kids/all-around-awesome blog Small For Big, which has several options for Valentine's Day cards you can make yourself:

• DIY Toddler Valenine's Cards with ways to take any doodle and make it worthy of mailing to the grandparents
• Monster Valentines you can dowload for free. All you have to do is cut, fold and send.
• And if monsters aren't your thing, there is also the too adorable Poppy Paper Doll, with enough amazing outfits to make Fashion Week proud.

And as always, if you are here from doing an Internet search for Handprint Crafts for Valentines Day, here are the best ones I've seen on my online wanderings:

• Kaboose shows how to make a Valentine Handprint Wall Hanging which is so cute it melts my cold anti-valentine heart. The hearts are made from painting the sides of the child's hands, and then having them press down on the paper with their little fists.

Photo from Kaboose.com

• Crafts-for-all-seasons has a whole tab of Valentine's Day Crafts, including some very sweet Handprint Valentines.  This craft creates the heart with the thumb and second finger of both hands, resulting in a very nice-and-a-little-bit-offbeat-too design.



Photo from Crafts-for-all-Seasons.com

• The Crafty Crow, which is always filled with incredible creations, has a round-up of 10 Valentine Crafts! My favorite is the Heart-in-hand pillow from A Little Great.  You clearly need to be a little great yourself to make this, but the directions are so good, it makes even a not-so-crafty mom like myself think I could pull it off.  And it really would be so, so nice to enjoy all-year-round.

Photo from ALittleGreat.com

And last, if handprint crafts aren't your thing, but baking is, one of my favorite blogs If You Can Make That You Can Make This has an amazing recipe for Rose Scented Cupcakes. We made them with the addition of India Tree Sparkling Sugar, and they were truly a beautiful treat. (Especially when you pair with Rose Pink Champagne for those of us in the over-21 category.)



Photo from Amazon.com


Do you have big plans for Valentine's Day?
However you celebrate, Happy Valentines Day!