When we started this blog we told you that we have 8 grandchildren who we love to get together. For most holidays throughout the year we hold a cousins party where they can come to Nanny and Grampy’s house and just enjoy each other. We will share our idea of fun with the kids and hope that you get some ideas of how to plan a little fun time with your own babies or grand babies. Our latest get-together was for Valentine’s Day.
All of our parties start with planning weeks in advance. The most difficult part, which is only getting more and more challenging as the kids get older, is to find a mutually agreeable time that all of the kids can make it. They all have very busy schedules with sports, after school activities and friends birthday parties etc… Once we settle on a date and time, we create an invitation so that the kids feel as though it is a special time, not just another visit to our house. We use the Canva.com app to create invitations because they have some pretty cool, easy to use templates that we can email to the parents (aka my kids) from the site and also print at home and hand deliver to the little ones. Having these invitations tacked up somewhere in their home hypes the event up so that they are excited when the day arrives.
We try to decorate the house accordingly and find useful things that go along with the theme. This year we found some cute plastic heart bowls at Target, 4 for $5 so we bought 2 packs of those. We also found some kids kitchen gadgets on Amazon $14.99 that the used. It came with child-safe heavy plastic knives, small cutters, and cutting boards that were useful with the pasta. We also grabbed a heart shaped ravioli cutter that the 13-year-old had fun with making her cheese raviolis.
Next comes planning the matching clothes for the kids. No, we are not psychotic, just love fun pics to look back on. We tend to shop online at The Children’s Place or Old Navy looking for matching family tee-shirts, pajamas, etc… We have found Valentine’s Day one of the more difficult holidays to find matching shirts in the sizes we need (18-month infant, toddler sizes, boy sizes and adult medium). Last year we opted for long-sleeved black Cousin Crew tee-shirts with hearts that we ironed on. This year we ordered red aprons and chef hats off Amazon that came out to around $5 per child.
Our favorite part of having these parties is planning the food. For Valentine’s Day, this is easy as it all about the pasta. We premake the pasta dough the morning of the party and leave the dough balls wrapped in saran wrap until ready to use. We made three batches using the recipe, Homemade Pasta from loveandlemons.com. We think some of the older kids would love to make the pasta too, but with 8 to wrangle and with all the different ages, we premake it. Do what works for your crew. The recipe states to use the KitchenAid mixer and the pasta attachment for rolling, but we prefer to make it by hand with the old-fashioned crank type. The kids really love to crank the pasta machine to roll the dough then pick the type of pasta shape they want – raviolis (heart or square), spaghetti or linguini. Jim makes a big pot of sauce with meatballs and sausages should anyone want those for their pasta. Last year it was all about the linguini and this year spaghetti. Our oldest granddaughter made heart shaped cheese raviolis and the adults had square shaped butternut squash raviolis with brown butter sage sauce with a recipe from selfproclaimedfoodie.com. To the squash mixture, we added some cinnamon and nutmeg to taste as we prefer the flavor with it.
There will always be a charcuterie board at every party we have because we love making these almost as much as eating them. We are amateurs at it for sure, but we don’t let that stop us. We know there is more to it than just picking cheeses, meats and fruits that we like and arranging them on a platter, but for now, it’s all good. Now that we are retired, maybe we will look into taking a class to elevate our choices of cheese, meats and accoutrements.
We love to make themed foods for each holiday. Valentine’s Day would not be complete without strawberries and chocolate, so we included a platter of strawberries with some chocolate to dip them into. We have done the hardened chocolate shell on strawberries before but found that the little ones had a hard time eating them (and they made quite a mess).
For an appetizer we made the grape tomato hearts caprese that we were seeing all over the internet which were not as easy as they appeared in the videos. It’s all about the angle. These were a favorite of both the adults and the kids. We always try to include some nutritious food for the kids rather than just junk. Often, we hide the distracting sweet stuff until everyone has at least attempted to eat the meal. In some of our other events you will see fruits and vegetables that we set out in amusing ways to entice consumption.
Dessert this year for the adults was one of our favorites, tiramisu from Allrecipes.com. We made the cream filling the night before and assembled it the morning of the party. It has to sit assembled in the fridge for 4-6 hours, so plan accordingly. The kids had cupcakes and ice cream cones. Typically, we frost the cupcakes when they are ready for them, then they decorate them. We offer sprinkles, etc… for them use. This year the kids were more eager for the ice cream than decorating their cupcakes. One of the 2-year-olds decided to use the frosting as face cream. That was fun. lol.
Now, we are on to planning for our St. Patrick’s Day party featuring boiled dinner, Irish music and lots of green foods!!. We will post that information next week!!
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