Valentine's Day

Since Valentine's Day fell on a long weekend this year, we decided to make it a 4 day weekend and spend it with Mike's mom, Dianne, down in Isle of Palms. We love to go visit her and the kids especially look forward to it.
We knew snow was in the forecast and it started out that Columbia would get a dusting and most of the snow would be near Charleston, so we were excited about the prospect of snow. Of course, with our luck, we should have known that's not quite how it would work out. It seems that wherever we are, snow is not!
As it turns out, Columbia got a good six inches or more and IOP only got an inch or two. Nonetheless, Sam and Abby were so excited about the snow. When Abby woke up Saturday morning I had her look outside to see it. She looked at me and said, "Now we can build a snowman. Let's get our coats." She was ready!
We ate a quick breakfast and bundled them up. Seeing as how were aren't exactly prepared for snow we had to improvise. Luckily, they had both gotten rubber golashes for Christmas so they wore those for boots. They had been wearing their fleece footie jammies, so I had them just put some clothes on over those. Poor Sam didn't even have gloves, so he wore a pair of Dianne's socks! Abby reminded us of the little brother from A Christmas Story - she looked like as stuffed tick!
Anyway, they enjoyed being out in the snow. The snow was too crunchy to really make snowmen or snowangels as they had hoped for, but Sam did get to slide down the golf course hill on a cardboard box and they had fun holding it - at least until their fingers got "stingy" as Abby put it. Of course it was all gone by lunchtime, but it was pretty to see snow on the beach. Not something you see every day!
On Valentine's we did a treasure hunt this year. I think this will definitely need to be a new tradition. Sam and Abby loved it! I had hidden clues around the house and we all followed after them reading the clues. It was cute to see them try to figure out where to go next and get excited about finding the clues. Their treasure ended up being a new squishy dinosaur for Sam and a Strawberry Shortcake set for Abby along with a few DVDs (Mike got a little carried away at Target!). It was a fun day spent with the ones we love. Abby curled up next to me to watch her new Barney DVD and just said, "I love you, Momma." These are truly the moments you cherish as a parent.
We finished up the day with some delicious BBQ ribs that Mike and Ralph (Dianne's boyfriend) made us for dinner - Yum-O!