Here's my latest puzzle I'm making and selling on ebay. This one has 37 peices but much easier than the dodecagon, and the noah's ark. I think this is my new favorite puzzle. I love making these!!

Tonight we had our family valentine's party since Tom and I went out last night. I made a chicken potpie in a heart pan, and we opened valentine's that Sarah had made for everyone. She really got into valentine's day this year, and even made a little calendar of activities that she wanted to do the days leading up to valentine's day.
For some games after dinner, I got onto puzzlemaker.com and made a cross-word puzzle and a word search that I blew up and taped on the wall so that we could all do it together. Puzzle maker is really cool because I could use whatever words I wanted for the puzzles. I used the kids names, and other valentine related words. We also played valentine bingo. I found a cute valentine's day bingo card online, uploaded it into "MS paint" and rearranged the little cards so that we had four different bingo cards. It was fun. We used Hershey's "kissables" candies as our markers, and ate them at the end of the game.

Yesterday (Thursday) was valentine's day. Tom ordered me flowers from pro-flowers.com and they were beautiful. Pink roses mixed with other types of lavender and purple flowers surrounding it. It even came with a nice vase. I suprised him by placing a boquet of heart-shaped mylar balloons and some candy in one of the heart boxes I made. I put them on the kitchen table at night after he went to bed on Wednesday, and he saw it in the morning when he came out to have breakfast valentine's day morning. During the day Kaitlyn and William and I went around to my different visiting teaching sisters and dropped off the pretzels and a heart shaped balloon for each of them...
For dinner we went to Charbroil steakhouse at the recommendation of a friend. It was good, but not spectacular. All in all it was a great valentine's day, although when we came home from the restauraunt, I fell asleep feeding the baby in our room while Tom was out in the family room talking with the babysitter. He came in and suprised me because I thought I thought I was only lying down for a minute, but to it had been an hour and I was fast asleep.... pretty funny..

On Wednesday afternoon after the kids finished their home work we made chocolate dipped pretzels. I melted some white chocolate and some milk chocolate, and we dipped them in the different chocolates. I colored some of the white chocolate pink-I just used normal food coloring, and they turned out really pretty. After we had dipped the pretzels in the three different colors, we drizzled them with opposite colors. They looked and tasted great! We made them for us and my visiting teaching sisters. And again I'm without a camera, but I'll take a picture of them and add them to this post when Tom comes home from work with it.

On Tuesday night Sarah, Kaitlyn and I made paper mache heart boxes. I had already put together some heart shaped boxes that I made from old cardboard. Then I had the girls rip up pink, purple and red construction paper. I made some paste out of flour and water, and we had a great time "plastering" the heart boxes with the colored paper. They looked pretty good-kind of like a valentine mosaic. I took a picture of it with my phone, but I can't figure out how to load it on my PC, if I do, I'll add it to this post.

Ahh...Dinner time.. it's the time when mom's all around the world are doing about 10 things at once. Tonight-a typical night- I started boiling the water for macaroni and cheese, and while I was waiting for the water to boil, I went out to my wood shop in the back of the house and cut the frame for one of the puzzles I'm making that sold today. Once that was cut, I used the wood glue to fasten the edges together, and held it together in one hand while it dried as I walked in the house. Once in the house, with the puzzle still in one hand, I began to empty the dishwasher with the other hand. Then I put down the puzzle so that I could put the macaroni in the water on the stove that was now boiling. I then went to the counter and started to trace the hearts for the heart boxes I'm making for my visiting teaching sisters this week for valentine's day- ( I got the pattern from Martha Stewart.com,) . Once I had the hearts traced, I went over to stir the macaroni, then back to finish emptying the dishwasher. As I was emptying the dishwasher Kaitlyn needed help putting on her "princess dress" since she was playing princess. Then it's back to check on the wood frame that I had glued together to make sure it was setting well. Then it's over to change the baby since he was over due. Then back to the macaroni and cheese. So... once dinner was done I had not only made dinner, but I had cut a wooden puzzle frame, started to make a homemade heart box, emptied the dishwasher, changed a diaper, and dressed a princess... I'm sure I'm not the only mult-tasking mother around... they're out there silently doing more in 20 minutes than most other people do in an entire day...