A tea party and cu'capes

Today we had a tea party with some of our favorite friends. My mom gave Claire a set of 4 matching antique teacups and saucers for her birthday in December. We decided that Valentine's Day would be an excellent time to invite some friends over and share our pretty things. There were cookies, cupcakes, fresh raspberries, cheese and crackers and two different kinds of tea. The big brothers stopped by the table occasionally for snacks, although they declined to sit and giggle with a table full of mostly little girls. :-)

Violet ended up under the table with her "cu'cape" before it was over. I love this age, when they really start communicating well, but still have cute little words that they use for some things.

Valentine's Day Card Exchange

Here are pictures of the things the boys received from participating in the Valentine Card Exchange over at The Fantastic Five.

 

First to arrive was this sweet little painted box. (Along with 3 bags of Valentine M&Ms for each of the boys, which were devoured before I got a picture of them!)

 Inside the boys found these adorable handmade magnets with their initials on them... 'L'ogan, 'M'atthew, and 'E'than!

 Next they received these sweetly hand stamped heart cards from some very young and hard working "Valentine" friends.

 They also received this beautiful heart transparency card from our sweet friends over at The Forest Room!

They really enjoyed participating, and Matthew and Ethan are already talking about what they would like to do next year. Maybe little Miss Claire will be big enough to enjoy participating next year!

xoxo

Will you "Bee" my Valentine?

First off... Thank you to everyone who commented and emailed us during our recent bout with the flu! We are all right as rain now! Thank you so much for your kind words of encouragement!

This year we signed up to be part of a Valentine's Card Exchange.  The kids were really excited about making their own handmade Valentine cards to send out to "new" friends in blogland. So I thought about it for a while and we bounced ideas around and finally decided to go really homemade! We would make our own paper! Seed paper to be exact, so that our new friends could plant their Valentines and watch pretty flowers grow all summer long!


This is our seed paper. We made it pink by adding red tissue paper to the paper pulp. Once we spread the wet paper pulp onto the screens to dry we sprinkled it generously with flower seeds. We chose cosmos seeds because of how easy they are to grow! Even the littlest gardener can grow lovely cosmos!

Then we cut out a simple flower shape from our homemade seed paper.
 

I found a cute clip art bee and printed out several on card stock. We cut those out along with flower stems from green card stock. The boys glued everything together and we wrote on each valentine:

"Will you "Bee" my Valentine?"

On the back I included a little folded note explaining that the paper flowers could be planted, grown and enjoyed all summer long!

Valentine flowers for all of our new Valentine Friends!