Valentine's Day Cookies

Tonight when we got home from taekwondo, we were spending a good deal of time making Valentine's Day cookies!  You can see from the picture above that we've been making these heart-shaped cookies for quite some time now, a wonderful little tradition that goes back many years.  Tonight we had "Madly Madagascar" on the television, while we were intricately decorating these heart cookies.  We'll keep a good number of them when we're done, but many of the others will be going to KidPak tomorrow night for the third graders.  And... we ate two of them tonight.  Sorry.  no self-control there.  We were just too tempted by all those sprinkles!

In the end we had a whole lot of cookies made, and this year I honestly have to say Madison had the most creative ones in the batch.  Here's one with what looks like stitches around the edges, and the word "LOVE" in the middle.

She spends a great deal of time thinking, planning and creating each cookie.  Obviously we are using limited materials here, and the point is to make something cute, and not something terribly ornate.  But she does a great job with what she has.  We each get about twelve or thirteen cookies, and decorate our own pan of cookies, then share the last one together.

It's nice, because we're all talking and watching holiday specials and making cookies, and of course eating the sprinkles too.  It puts a smile on your face.  Also, apparently, a smile on this cookie's face.

She's been doing things with patterns too, all kinds of different patterns.  In the end, her pan had this wondrous variety of designs and drawings on it.  She spent a good while on this, well over an hour.  It was fun!

Today was rainy, in fact on the rough side.  We had this big front swing through, completely drenching us.  Daddy was at a barbecue restaurant in Oakwood with a few other co-workers when "the bottom dropped out."  It was quite a storm that washed through.

Madison didn't get to see the storm so much, as she was indoors all day and not quite out there in the weather (at least not until we were going to taekwondo).  Today is Lincoln's birthday, and he would be 210 years old today if he were still alive.  Which would be fairly impressive, actually.   We had a heart on Madison's door this morning, one with Lincoln on it, that said, "We Love You Because You're Honest."  In the past, we've had Lincoln logs and pennies, but the heart was good enough.  I suppose we could have passed along a five dollar bill too...