This year for Valentine's Day I wanted to do something a little different. So about two weeks before the holiday I started doing some planning and investigation on the internet and came across something called a "heart attack" where you cover your house with hearts.
I thought this sounded pretty fun so the next week I went to Michael's and bought three packs of construction paper: red, pink, and white. Then on Saturday morning, while Jill had gone over to Disneyland, I locked the door of the bedroom and cut out literally hundreds of hearts. As I was cutting them out, I decided that I needed to included a clever saying on each one. I had three size hearts, for the largest hearts I wrote some longer sayings including some lines from our favorite old songs. For the smallest hearts, I used some sayings that had been on Sweetheart candies over the years, which I got off the internet. For the medium size hearts, I just started writing up any thoughts that came to me and wrote them in one of my notebooks. I tried to customize these and included sayings about Jill, and all my kids and their spouses, and even my mother and mother-in-law.
In addition to the heart attack, I bought some red and pink ballons, crate paper streamers to go across the ceiling, and a package to make sugar cookies which I would cut out in heart shapes.
My biggest problem was when to do the heart attack. As it just so happens the day before Valentine's day was Sunday and I was scheduled to go to the Redondo 3rd Ward's ward conference at 11:30, while Jill and the girl's would go off to our ward at 8:45. It seemed like a perfect time so as they got ready for church, I tried to keep a straight face and pretend that I was just going to have a lazy morning before leaving for my meetings. Just before they left, I gave them a small hint when I decided that I needed to pre-heat the oven to get the cookies finished first. Luckily, they were so busy that they left without noticing the oven.
As soon as the car was out of the driveway, I put my plan into work. I started with the cookies. As the cookies baked, I started to put up the hearts. I had originally planned to put hearts in every room except the bedrooms. But as I started to put them around, I realized that was a little too ambitious. Just covering one room took much longer than I thought. At one point, I blew up some of the balloons but realized that was also taking too long and decided to not complete that part. When I left finally left, I had covered the entire first floor and stairwell in hearts and had a big plate of unfrosted cookies on the dining table.
Jill says that when she, Mckay, and Maddy came home at 1pm (they had to stay late because she had a meeting) they were totally shocked. They just walked around the room laughing as they read every heart including a few that the Mckay and Maddy deemed "inappropriate" such as the one I put up in the kitchen that said "Let's Spoon." Luckily, I keep most of them G-rated.
When I came home I got a big hug from each of them. We invited the Manley children (Maggie and Josh) over to help frost the cookies after we heard that little Claire had been in the hospital all week with pneumonia. Maddy explained to Maggie about all the hearts all over the house by saying "uh, yeah my Dad went a little crazy."
The next day, Valentine's Day, all my hard work paid off when I got a surprise candle light dinner at home with my three sweethearts that included pink mashed potatoes and a heart shaped meatloaf. Does that rock or what!!
A lot of people don't like Valentines day. I'm not one of them.
Here are a few pictures of the "heart attack"
