Last year, we really couldn’t leave the house on February 14th, as Snowmaggedon rained, errr, snowed down upon us. We had no choice but to celebrate Valentine’s Day at home; and we LOVED it!
The last few COVID years have shown me, among many things, that great joy can be found within the walls of my home with my little family.
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Here’s what we did:
The night before, I found every pink, purple and red decorative item I had and decorated our breakfast table for a special Valentine’s Day at home breakfast. I had plastic tablecloths, pink silk flowers, Target dollar spot diamond banners and pink donut plates spread out for my daughter in the morning and she was so excited!
That morning we made CINNAMON SWIRL PANCAKES a la Kerby Lane, and BACON. YUM! We made pancake batter like we normally do, then mixed melted butter, cinnamon and brown sugar together and placed in a squeeze bottle. As we fried up the pancakes, we used the squeeze bottle to swirl in the cinnamon sugar mixture. They were a DIVINE addition to our Valentine’s Day at home!
Later that day, we made easy CHOCOLATE COVERED STRAWBERRIES together using chocolate almond bark from the baking aisle at HEB. It is super easy to melt, and you just dip the strawberries in the melted chocolate and place on wax paper to harden. We brought these to our sweet neighbor friends, and had a few ourselves too! Messy but good!
Last year my daughter was in 1st grade and they learned a lot about two-dimensional shapes using plastic pattern blocks; As a fun activity, I challenged my daughter to create as many different combinations of heart shapes as possible using the pattern blocks. We actually had so much fun together creating geometric heart shapes in different ways!
Finally, dinner! We had a fondue party!!! It was so fun and DELICIOUS! I found a simple recipe online for cheese and chocolate fondue that was kid-friendly (no wine in the cheese) and cooked them on the stove. We happen to have a three-pot warming mini-stove (don’t know how else to describe it) so, once the cheese and chocolate were ready, I put them in the mini-pots and decided to melt some caramel in the third pot. We dipped veggies, sourdough bread, sausage and cooked cheese tortellini in the cheese, and fruit, cake, and cookies in the chocolate and caramel. We all sat at the table together, dressed in our fancy Valentine’s day clothes, ate our fondue, then had a dance party contest as we watched the snow start falling.
It was truly a wonderful, family Valentine’s date that I will always remember, and that we plan on recreating this year! Do you plan on spending Valentine’s Day at home?
