Valentine's Day prep

We're fast approaching the 14th and we've been having some fun getting ready for Valentine's Day.  I love everything about this month, I love the heart shaped candy, I love all the pink and red hearts, and I love all the love themed clothing, I mean how can you go wrong with this stuff.

Simone of course loves it all just as much which is awesome so when we decided to make our own Valentine's for her school friends she was totally on board. There are so many awesome ideas on Pinterest for cute little treats that don't involve candy and we decided to go with the one with the cute crazy straws. It was fun tracking down the supplies and I found these cute straws at Target in the party section, I'm finding a lot of good items in that section lately and these straws were only $3.00 for a dozen.  The original idea for this little gift was just the crazy straw and the card slipped on it but I decided to add in a single serve drink mix too.  I found the single serve drinks mixes and the heart cellophane bags at my dollar store.  I picked up the heart doily's at Joann's and made the sentiment card myself and cut it out with my Cameo.

It was all hands on deck for the assembly and Simone had fun for about 15 minutes. She did a great job attaching the little heart cards I made to the doily's and stuffing all the straws and drink mixes into the bags but by then she was bored and abandoned the project.

I used my tiny attacher to adhere the twisty ties that came with the cellophane bags to the cards.

Here they are all done.  I think they came out super cute and I hope the kids like them. 

Simone has also been asking to make Valentine cookies since mid January so we finally set out to do some baking this past Saturday.  We decided to make some cookies and she also asked to make rice crispy treats.  We decided to make them pink and found these giant strawberry and vanilla marshmallows at our grocery store.

She did a good job mixing and didn't let anything burn.

You might guess who was in charge of sprinkle distribution....

For the cookies I wanted to try something new and found this yummy recipe online for Dark Chocolate Sugar Cookies.  The dough was super easy to make and I followed the suggestion to use the Hershey Special Dark cocoa powder.  The dough was amazing, so silky and smooth, and when you rolled it out it was heaven.  Here they are cut and ready to bake.

Someone wanted more sprinkles so I decided to melt some semi sweet morsels and dipped the top bit of each cookie, some got sprinkles and then I let them harden in the fridge.  I hope you try them because these cookies are delicious!

I hope you have a great Valentine's Day!