Table For 6: Family Dinner with Our Little Valentines

Just sharing a peek into our Valentine’s Day Family Dinner, with our little valentines!

In getting ready for our special dinner together, one of the kids wrote this on my little chalk board that I use for schooling the kids sometimes. First, it made me smile.  Then, I found out who wrote it, so we could have a little discussion about how they determined where they should put that apostrophe.  It turns out, they were under the impression, that St. Valentine’s name, was  St. Valentines.  Therefore, because his name ended in s, it would be acceptable to just put an apostrophe after the s in his name, to show possession of his day.   So, if she was right, she would have been right!  But she was wrong, so she was wrong. Know what I mean? lol.  In the end, she learned something new on Valentine’s Day:  That the saints name, was indeed St. Valentine.  Not St. Valentines.  No S.  Just like our LAST name. ; )

See?  Schooling 24/7.

I resisted the urge to fix it. Just because I felt like I needed to SO badly, and knew there might be an issue there with myself, that I needed to work on. So I just left it.  Not feeling free yet though.

 Our afternoon dinner table, all set.  We actually eat dinner together as a family every single night. But the kids get excited for dinner like these, because we go above and beyond the normal, to make it special. Special pretty table setting, candles, surprises, and more. It’s just fun to do with the kids, and see their excitement over the occasion.
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We’ve still got this little tree going. To decorate it for Valentine’s Day, the kids made cut out hearts, and wrote something on them that we can do to ‘show our love’ to someone.  One of my favorites is:  “Give a foot rub?“.  Yes, with a question mark. lol. That was {A}’s, who possibly gives the world’s best foot rubs, and I possibly may want one more frequently than she wants to give one.
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Back in the summer time, our local CVS (pharmacy) moved from it’s location, to a bigger and newer construction, further up the street.  Aside from my grumbling that CVS would now be further  up the street, I wasn’t sure how I felt about a ‘Dollar Tree’ moving into the old CVS, either.  Not having much experience with that store, and therefore really questioning the quality of product we’d find in there, I was leaning towards disappointment.

But as it turns out, I’ve found the store rather useful.  There really are some darn good finds there sometimes, and the pricing certainly fits our budget!

So I checked out the Dollar Tree, to see what helpful items I could find for our dinner.  Looking at the photo above, I got the plastic champagne flutes (which the kids got such a kick out of), the gift bags, their cards (2 for $1! )the napkins, and the candles and glass candlesticks!  Not bad, for a fancy-ish dinner setting!

The kids loved their surprises.

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For the dinner’s main course, I made Shrimp and Pasta Diablo!  Thankfully, the sky is the limit when planning a menu, even for a meal with our kids. They’ll eat just about anything under the sun, and they sure loved this dish, too.  They really love shrimp and pasta anyway. {O} did leave just a few tomato pieces on her plate.  There was definitely some ‘heat’ to those tomatoes, so I was surprised they all ate as many as much as they did. 2 out of 4 of the kids, had seconds! As did Michael of course.  But I can never eat that much of anything. It was delicious though.

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A couple days prior, a good friend of ours, who LOVES to cook and bake, and does a whole lot of BOTH, so thoughtfully delivered to us some banana cake he made, as well as 6 molten lava cupcakes! We decided to save the cupcakes for our special Valentine’s dinner, so dessert would be covered.  It seemed like the perfect dessert to top off our family dinner.  And boy was it ever!
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We really felt the love.  With every-single-bite! I would have taken a photo of the inside, but that would have required me to put down my fork, and pick up my camera, at a very excitable time.  Goodness!  We’ve been invited to have dinner with him and his wife at their home this week.  I’m tempted to bring my camera, and photograph it all, but I don’t want to freak them out! lol.  I know he is going to have a reallly goood menu plan, just for us.  He’s brought us other food and treats before.  But also because Michael said that he said, in inviting us, “I plan on doing some cooking this week!”  See….when someone says something like that, in that way, you know they are serious about their cooking!  We really look forward to spending a few hours with he and his wife. They are just good peeps.   With our without the good food.  But they want to feed us too?  Well….alllriiiiiight.  If they insist.

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It was nice that St. Valentine’s Day landed on a Sunday this year, wasn’t it?  We opted to go to 4:00 Mass on Saturday, to leave Sunday wide open to get ready for our afternoon date with each other.  We rarely do that, (go to Saturday Mass) because the Saturday Mass is just not the same for us, at all.  And it wasn’t again.  But as always, the homily was good!

So how was YOUR Valentine’s Day?  Did you do anything special? Celebrate in some small way?  Go all out?  Skip it all together?

We’d love to know.

Oh, and also, we recommend you be on the lookout for a Give-Away!  That’s all we’re sayin’.

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