A Lovely Valentine's Day

We've never been much on celebrating Valentines Day, but Maddie is all about holidays right now.  She's been anticipating Valentines Day since Christmas basically!  So we made the day special by making some home made Valentines, decorations, and yummy goodies.  It was a really fun day, and I think a memorable one with some new traditions started.

We started out with a breakfast of "heart" pancakes...
or panny cakes as they are known around here!

Then we went downstairs to make some decorations and
special Valentines for Daddy and friends.

We made heart shaped pizzas for lunch

The were a big hit!

And we just couldn't waste the dough that was left over from cutting
out the hearts,so we made beneit bites with them.

We used some of our broken crayons to make heart shaped crayons to give friends.

Chocolate Sugar cookies for Daddy

Our decorations... The banner had a heart for each kiddo with the things they "loved".
We will add to it each year. 

On it Madeline wrote 1 John 4:7 "let us love one another, for love is from God." Along with all the Valentines activities I tried to make this the theme of our day.  We talked about the only way we know what true love is, is because God has loved us so much! We talked about God loving us enough to send Jesus to die and pay for our sins, and because he has loved us like this, we should love others by laying down our lives for them.  Trying to explain and demonstrate this to a 4, 3, and almost 2 year old took some creativity.  We tried... and are still carrying on teaching moments from that day... to teach them sacrificial love where it hits them the most.  Giving up a toy that another wants to play with, or letting the other pick out the video that we watch is a BIG deal right now to my precious little sinners' hearts :)!  It's in these small (but Big to them) ways, I pray God is starting to reveal to them the depth of love he has for them by making the greatest sacrifice of all.