The Bagwell Family: February: Love, Parties and a Glimpse of the Sun

What a lovely month we had. Pretty much the only way to beat the after-Christmas-winter-blues is Valentine's Day. The kids loved making and putting up decorations, admiring them all month long, and preparing for the big day.

February was a great month for parties. We went to a preschool party where the kids decorated cookies, painted hearts with colored ice on toothpicks (very cool, not very messy and sorry no pictures) and exchanged Valentines. Millie's were a combination of a free printable found at Made to Be a Momma and some dollar store wedding bubbles.

Louis handed out ones that say "You make my heart glow" (from Delia Creates) with added glow sticks we had left over from Halloween. Both were big hits. My favorite part of doing the Valentines was that Millie was willing to sign the back of hers, and even did a couple of Louis'! I haven't seen her write any other words besides "Millie" so this was a pretty big deal.

I was invited to a "Ladies Valentine's Exchange" put on by one of my friends, Amy over at Sometimes Creative. It was fabulous. Each guest was to bring 12 "Valentines". They could be pretty, edible, homemade, really anything you wanted. I made microwaveable hand warmers as my Valentine and I think they turned out adorable (though hard to photograph). I made the tags using my silhouette. Easier than it looks, just how I like my crafts.

I came home with a vintage tea cup candle, Anthropologie pinch bowl, pink popcorn, kitchen towel with pink yoyos, earings, garland, wooden spoon, lotion, cupcake in a jar, set of notecards and cute mason jar of m&ms.

Actual Valentine's Day was great as well. The kids woke up to a fun spread at the breakfast bar including one balloon each, several cards from us and relatives and of course a small box of chocolates each. As you may have seen in the video, the balloons were a huge hit. Had I known it only takes a balloon from the dollar store to get them to run laps around the house by themselves I probably would have been buying them all winter long!

Since my brother is in town (aka free babysitter) we decided to splurge a little on our Valentine's date night. We finally made our way to a highly recommended restaurant, The Turf Room. Even though we thought this out well in advance the dinner reservations we ended up with were for 9PM. Good thing we're still in our 20's haha! The place was really neat, sort of rustic with a huge fireplace in the middle and couches to lounge around at. The food was good, but there are so many places to still try around here it will probably be a while before go again.

The snow level hit new heights this month, and we learned to throw snow over our heads in shoveling the driveway since the mounds are just too high. Checking mail has been a challenge for most of the month though we did eventually get rain which took the snow level down quite a bit. Now we've got lots and lots of ice.

We had a good two or three days above freezing which meant we were finally able to stretch our legs, soak up some sun and take out our bikes (from Christmas) for the first time. It was so nice, but unfortunately now that Louis has had a taste of outside that all our sweet boy wants to do and the weather is not cooperating. Hopefully soon.

On a whim Buck got some tickets to the Bulls game this past weekend from a co-worker who wasn't able to go, and since we have Xan to help watch the kids we were able to make a date night of it. Yes, that's TWO date nights in one month! It was lots of fun, very high energy and entertaining. It helped that we had pretty good seats, a parking pass and it was free. It was my first professional basketball game and even I was impressed with how the teams worked together. It's not easy to understand the synergy watching on TV. The highlight was when the Bulls scored 100 points and the crowd went wild because it meant everyone there won a free Big Mac. So funny. Now that Jimmer is playing for the Bulls, I seeing more games in our future.