Valentine's Day

We love our holidays. For Valentine's Day, as our valentine to the girls, we decided to throw a Valentine Tea Party for girls and dolls. We let each girl invite three friends.

We used my grandmother's tea cup collection, pink and silver china and linens, and dainty decor. The dolls had tea cups, a tea pot, creamer and sugar as well. Joe used his best British accent to serve them. (You can click to enlarge the pictures.)

  

 

 

 

  

For the food, we served heart-shaped Napoleons filled with raspberries and vanilla cream, watermelon hearts, strawberries with Nutella, and other treats. We also served raspberry tea. The hit of the party, however, was the sugar cubes! Never has so much tea been drunk!

 

 

    

 

We had camping, horses and a bakery set up for the dolls in Jia's room.

 

 

 

Willa's room had gymnastics and other sports, and the doll hospital. 

 

 

We had a craft table in the basement where the girls made valentines, bookmarks, votives and bracelets for themselves and their dolls. I did not get too many pictures down there as I was wielding a glue gun for most of the time. :-)

 

Overall, it was so much fun. I think it will be an annual tradition!

Xin nian kuai le!

We celebrated Lunar New Year by attending an event held by the Chinese Heritage Foundation. The girls learned new songs, ate yummy food, prepared dumplings, received red envelopes and did papercutting. They also participated in a contest and Jia won two all-day passes to rides at the Mall of America!

We ate a special Chinese meal at home, too, to celebrate, and girls were excited to dress up for it.

 

 Fun!

Sleepovers

Jia and her sweet new friend, Ava, have been spending a lot of time together...including two sleepovers (with more planned)! Here they are at their first one:

 

I had to laugh when Ava's mom sent me this picture because we were in the middle of doing this:

 

 

They don't look ready to sleep, do they?

 

 

Here they are at their second sleepover:

 

They have so much fun together. I'm glad they found each other!

Frozen fun

It has been chilly here, but we've been managing to have fun both inside and out.

We've had a few very cold days (as in fifteen below with thirty below windchill). Such cold days allow for terrific science experiments! We threw some batches of boiling water into the air, and most of it turned into a cloud! We filled a balloon with water, added red and purple food dye, and it turned into a beautiful turquoise (?) ice marble! We were confounded by the resulting color, but it was indeed pretty. We froze raw eggs and used them to hammer nails, too!

Willa also had the sledding hill and ice rink to herself one morning!

We joined Jia's girl scout troop for roller skating at Roller Garden. It was the girls' first time. They did so well. Jia just slowly shuffled around until she got the hang of it. Willa was a different story. I get such a kick out of her when she tries new things. I remember when she tried ice skating, she immediately tried to do figure eights. With roller skating, she was doing all these funky moves with her feet. I'm not sure what she was tried to accomplish, but I think she was trying to mimic the people who were lifting up their legs and crossing them over.  She fell down really hard a few times and even flipped over once, but it didn't seem to phase her!

 

Love the kooky dinosaur skater mural there!

 

Anyway, we had a great time and I think it may become a regular family thing!