penguin begets penguins: Hearts for my hearts

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. This is a holiday that I have never enjoyed. I am not a romantic woman, not at all.

I have been known to go nuts buying all the kitschy decorations & twee red or pink, heart-covered clothes but I have never had any sentimental attachment to the holiday.

Until this year.

Not sure if it's hormones or the fact that I have one little gentleman that loves any reason for excitement & another little gentleman who loves cuddling but consider me super-psyched for Cupid this go 'round.

I have plans for fun crap - a few little red gifts for the boys & a paper heart trail for Benny to follow as well as making a big batch of Not Guilty chocolate chip cookies with red M&M's instead of chocolate chips. For heaven's sake, I even bought a Valentine's Day dress that's white on top & red on the bottom - verrrry cute but when I washed it (by itself in cold water), the red stained the white. I guess I'll spend my Valentine's Day taking that sucker back. Then I have speech class so no real time for romance anyway.

We started celebrating early today & made some heart-shaped strawberry hand pies. I realize they are a bit of a trend so it's too late to change their name but there has got to be a more appetizing name than "hand pies."

I am doing my best to force Ben to become the next Adriano Zumbo.

Is that too much to ask of my son?

I forgot to take an "after" picture of the little darlings but I didn't put the heart-shaped strawberry on top of them anyway because we enjoyed chopping up strawberries for the filling too much.

Much cuter in the "before" state.

Our cheerleader.

We finally made it to IKEA(more on that later) & were able to grab Evan one of their handy dandy highchair wraparound cushions so he can sit up like he's been so desperate to do.