Cards are made, steaks are marinating, and the table is set ...

Valentine's Day is a GREAT reason to have a family PARTY.  February 14th this year fell on a Tuesday which is my normal ACRES work day.  On the days I head into the office there is no telling what time I'll be home so I decided to schedule our family party a day early on Monday.  Will and I spent a lot of the day making fun preparations for it ...

Monday baking this week included making red velvet cupcakes for our celebration.  

In my mind, they were going to look like this... with some of those cute toothpick flaggie things that the really exceptional bakers do ...

Alas, I am NOT a really exceptional baker and with still several minutes to go on the timer, I noticed smoke coming out of the oven and pulled out these sad little guys.  So, despite what I envisioned in my head, what they really looked like was this:

BURNT!!  

After making the cupcakes, I left the remains of the batter in the Bosch to activate the yeast for our bread.  Let's just say that RED velvet is very red!!  Just the scrapings on the sides of the bowl made for some PINK dough for this week's pizza, rolls, and bread.  

I just pretended that was my plan all along. :-)

For Valentine's Day, we all make our good Daddy homemade cards... And I set them all out on the table from years past too, so we can look at them all week.  

No Barrett party would be complete without sparkling cider and lots of toasts...  The boys had fun drinking their sparkling cider from crystal flutes.

And balloons!  Because, why not?  :-)

 I baked a small (wimpy) cake round with the excess batter from the cupcakes and good thing, too, because its all that survived the burning oven.  Not that the kids (or my cute husband) noticed that it was a wimpy cake instead of beautifully decorated cupcakes.  They are so (mercifully) easy to please!!

After dinner and dessert we had a scavenger hunt for the boys' Valentine's gifts.

Will cracked us up.  When he heard, "Scavenger Hunt", he immediately responded, "CAN WE GET A BOY BABY THIS TIME??"  Ha ha!  He was thinking about this hunt a few months back when we all found out were were expecting a girl together.  Nope, no new sibling this time! :-)

Scavenger hunts around here are total fun and total chaos...  This year's hunt took about an hour to plan and probably 5 minutes to finish!  They are FAST!

This year's hunt ended up in Daddy's closet with some fun dollar store toys for each of the boys.  We forego candy for gifts for most (if not all) holidays and opt for cheap entertainment instead.  Last year they found new books in the fridge.

What fun to celebrate Valentine's Day with our lively, and growing, family...

Side note: Here is an updated picture of the fireplace and door we finished painting this weekend.  Didn't that cute husband do an AWESOME job??  Design on a dime central over here.  I couldn't tell you exactly what we spent on this project (Tim probably could), but it wasn't much.  What a difference a can of paint (and a huge amount of hours) made on those doors!  I even broke out the oil rubbed bronze spray paint for the doorknob as I just couldn't bring myself to put up the brass knob on our new and improved doors.  Now, Tim wants to jump right into encasing the beams with wood and molding.  I'm putting a hold on that one for now (although I know it will look awesome) so we can start on the nursery.  I'm already over budget on that one and I haven't even started!  :-)