Happy Valentine's Day!

We celebrated Valentine's Day in style, as usual! The kids really got into it this year, helping me make the Valentine's cards for their classes, making and decorating cookies for Daddy, and all that fun stuff!

1. Kate was really excited about her new nightgown from Memere and Poppy.  2.  She loves her new gymnastics t-shirt from Grandma and Grandpa.  3.  It was a very Lego V-day from us.  4.  Brett was WAY excited about his Transformer t-shirt from us.  5.  Again, a very Lego V-day!  6.  New Aaron Rodgers trading card and car combo pack!

The massive pile of Valentine's Day cards for the kids' classes - robots with Hershey's mini bars as the body.  Thanks, Pinterest.  Well, actually thanks to Lisa Storms, but really Pinterest for letting me find her awesome site!

A few years ago, my mom (aka Memere) made these heart-shaped lemon-flavored sugar cookies with icing.  The boys (aka, Todd and my dad) loved them, so they became this "thing" every Valentine's Day.  On one hand, I don't have to rack my brain to figure out what to get Todd.  On the other hand, they take a long time to make and are pretty tedious!  Here is Kate helping me make the dough and royal icing before school one morning.  They have to sit in the fridge for a few hours.  There is a great recipe and tutorial on Annie's Eats.

Cookies baked and the piping is done!  That's my least favorite part.  Here's a tip - if you hold the piping bag a little ways away from the cookie, you won't see every little hand shake in your detailed piping!  Yay!

(almost) finished!  I went back and did a little more piping on top of some of the plain cookies once the icing dried, but didn't take any pictures of those.  You'll just have to trust me!

Vroom Vroom!

We continued our tradition of spending an afternoon at the International Auto Expo this past weekend.  It's a fun, laid back, kid-friendly event.  It's really fun for us when we're actually looking to buy a new car in the near future.  This is not one of those years!  However, we did enjoy looking at all of the large SUVs (since that's what we tend to buy these days), as well as some fun, impractical sports cars.  We also totally lucked out in that the classic car show was going on right next door at the same time.  Win, win!

Brett buckling Kate in for safety.  By the time we left, Kate finally learned to buckle herself.  Thank you, Lord!

Checking everything out first - our cautious driver.

God help me when this is a reality!

Grandma said that his Camaro will be replacing her mini van.

The Americana Pride Camaro

I'll take this one - it's only $130k. 

Kate liked the race car

Our kids have always had a fascination with Mini Coopers.

I'd take this one too :)

Onto the classic car show - we only had about 15-20 minutes to walk around before they closed, so it was quick!

Happy NMD!

Happy National Marquette Day!

Grandma's Princess

I thought that I had seen just about everything when it came to little kid birthday parties. I mean, our kids are pretty social and tend to get invited to a billion and one birthday parties every year, so when I saw the invitation to this place, I sort of figured that it would be a typical 5 year old girl birthday party. Let me tell you - it was awesome. Like every little girls' best birthday party ever kind of awesome. And it was not expensive, and they do EVERYTHING for you except the invitation and thank you notes. How awesome is that?! Hmm... definitely has my gears thinking for a certain little princess's birthday in July! The place is called Grandma's Princess in downtown Apex, so it's a little hike for us North Raleigh girls, but it was well worth it!

Some of the girls, discussing their shoe selections

Watching one of their friends get all fancy

Kate getting her nails painted by "Grandma" herself!

3 of the sweet princesses (birthday girl on the far left)

Sitting down for "tea" (pink lemonade)

A view of the dressing room - look at all of those dresses!!

And more dresses to choose from - and there were even more not pictured!

Plenty of jewelry to choose from too - all of this was leftover AFTER our group of girls chose their jewels!!

Plenty of hair pieces for everyone

Singing to the birthday girl!