snow valentines

We recently checked out Snow Valentines by Karen Gray Ruelle and really enjoyed it. Juliet became especially interested in recreating a giant snow heart (the snow valentine) featured on one of the pages of the book. There were also hearts made of sticks, branches, rocks, etc...(much more achievable).

Due to the fact that we live in Georgia, there are very few days in which we have snow at all--let alone enough snow to sculpt a giant heart, BUT fortune smiled upon us and dumped quite a helping of snow on us a few weeks ago.

Juliet was thrilled--the rest of us, not so much. (Pretty much the entire city was shut down for a week.) And while we didn't manage to make a giant snow heart because it was really icy and we only have trash bags for gloves (go ahead, those of you from arctic regions can laugh at us), we did take the opportunity to go out and make some snow/ice valentines of our own.

We started with a bag of walnuts and shoved them into the ice in a nice heart shape.

Somehow, that didn't seem like enough, so we used some magnolia leaves to spell out I love you. I think our squirrels appreciate the extra effort.

Stumbled across some red berries and tried to fashion another heart...

Finally, we made several attempts to make a giant heart out of red thread (like the one in A Village Full of Valentines) but the wind kept blowing the string across the frozen sheet of ice that was our yard. So we sort of crunched it into the snowman Ben had made with Juliet the day before.

(do you like the rain boots, jeans, and okay, I guess we did find some mittens...)

Juliet kept reminding me that is was NOT Valentines day (so why the heck are we doing this, mom?), but we probably won't have any snow when February 14th rolls around, so it was best to get our fun in while we had it!