Giving Valentine's Day a Piece of my Mind

My brother and his family are visiting and to welcome them yesterday my mom made a big spaghetti and meatball dinner up at her house for everyone. I told my girls early in the day that we'd be going up there for dinner (it's been a restless week around here... I think we need to get out; today should be a good day for that, with a sunshiney high temperature of 48!) and they got pretty excited about the part about spaghetti and meatballs.  And awhile later, I found this:

 And then they showed me this:

 Turns out they'd though the entire roll of toilet paper would make an excellent pile of their own pretend spaghetti and meatball dinner.  On the one hand, how can you argue creativity? On the other hand, do they realize that shredded up "spaghetti" toilet paper doesn't do the job nearly as well as when it is in its complete form on and on the roll? (and actually in the bathroom...)

Hahaha.  Silly girls!

Our Valentine's Day this year was unlike any other, to say the least.  At first we had planned to have a "big party" for all of our "friends."  One problem: we have no friends.  Anja thought the idea of a party was great, but when she realized that meant having people to our house, she immediately changed her mind.  SO we pared it down to be just a party with the cousins, which was great.  We made little heart-and-doily decorations and strung them up from all the doorways and windows.  I found some cute little wooden birdhouses and glitter paint on sale and the kids painted birdhouses.  They thought that was cool.  And then they just played and my mom and sister and I knitted the afternoon away and it was very nice.  Oh, and we all gorged on chocolate.

 Then after everyone was gone and Martin got home, we thought we'd go out to dinner, just to be festive.  We hadn't made reservations anywhere, so we drove by O'Charley's but it was PACKED... and we ended up going to Panera, where we had a nice little dinner and Greta and I shared a sandwich.

....and then about an hour later we came home and started throwing up! Gross!  Usually when I get sick, it's a few hours of grossness,then it's over and I get back to normal immediately. I try to make it a non-issue as fast as possible.  This was really different. Now, I have never had food poisoning before, and I'm still reluctant to place the blame on that, mostly because I always make fun of people who chalk every stomach bug up to food poising, when there's no way it's THAT common.  I thought we just had a bug.  But then nobody else got it, and when I was telling the rest of my family about it last night they all said it was food poising.  Weird!  So I guess now Greta and I have had food poisoning and it was quite unpleasant.

And while it was not the most romantic of Valentine's Days, it was one to remember.