Valentine Plans & Ideas?

We didn't get the gingerbread house built at Christmas, and I'm thinking of having Kiddo and a friend decorate it with a few boxes of Sweetheart candies. (Boy, have the messages on those changed since I was a little girl and actually thought they tasted good. ;) )

We usually start making valentines (very simple, cardstock hearts, stickers, drawing if he wants, which he loves to do, names) in early February. Do a few every few days or so.

My husband and I usually exchange cards and good craft beers for each other, maybe some good chocolate. Kiddo gets a card from one of us (I usually do a watercolor or make something) and a little something. Probably a small Lego set this year and a little chocolate, too.

We celebrate my youngest son's birthday. St Valentine's Day doesn't seem to be such a big holiday in my country compared to the US (from what I see on TV).

I've discovered all sorts of cookie decorating sites on Facebook recently, & so the weekend before, I'm going to try my hand at that. Just regular sugar cookies, with pretty frostings & embelishments, not actual designs, or making them look like people/animals yet!

One of my classmates cannot eat wheat, so I will be experimenting with a regular sugar cookie recipe, & a gluten-free variety that I've had & doesn't taste horrible.

If he's good, I might even save a few for the hubby!! =-) T.

We do it as a family thing - always have. So it's normally a fun activity (Build-A-Bear, movies, bowling, etc) and dinner at a place we don't normally go to.

This year, we are driving to SC to meet my newest niece! She is hopefully going to be born in the next couple of hours and then we will go when we can stay for longer than one day.

Some of the fun things we do:
-make fortune cookies (actually pretty easy to make! They do not store well so need to be eaten same day). We write fortunes to put in them and deliver to neighbors.
-This year we had a lot of fun decorating for Valentines day. It helped that my mom, the thrift-shop warrior, had boxes of stuff she could not fit in her new place, so I ended up with tons of new decor, ha ha. You can find cute ideas on Pinterest; what we did was go through our photos and I put lots of cute pictures of the kids as babies and of me and my husband's engagement photos in cute frames. We also made fake sweets- bon bons and cupcakes- and set them all over the house along with glass candy jars full of valentine candy. To make fake treats, you basically fill cupcake liners halfway full with expandable foam, let set over night, then paint them to look the color of cupcake batter you want, then mix lightweight spackle with food coloring and pipe it on with frosting bags, Decorate with glitter, sprinkles, puff paint (brown puff paint looks like chocolate syrup), candles, etc. This was a super fun project for the kids. It did take about 3 days though.
-We make valentines; I have a lot of arts and crafts stuff, paper and rubber stamps. We pull it all out and have a lot of fun.