This is REIL fun: Monkey Love

Monday, February 22, 2016

Monkey Love

On February 8th, Len and I celebrated the new year of the monkey with a date to the Mandarin Buffet. Yum! We are definitely going back there. After our meal they gave us these cute red envelopes with their "Mandarin" coins inside.

On February 13th, Len and I celebrated Valentine's Day with a date to the National Gallery. We went to see the temporary Monet exhibit "Bridges to Modernity" and unfortunately it was such a disappointment. Monet is one of my favorite artists and I was hoping to have a wonderful experience like we did when we visited his home in Giverny, France. We still had a great date though as we got to visit our favorites on display in the permanent collection. I just adore these statues by Jean-baptiste Carpeaux. On the right is Neapolitan Fisherboy with Shell (1857-1862) and on the left is Girl with a Shell (1863-1867).

On February 14th, we celebrated both Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day with the kiddos.

We had a scrumptious Chinese food feast...

...followed by a fresh strawberry Valentine's cake.

This cake is seriously soooo good!

Fresh strawberries and strawberry jello make the cake so tasty, I filled it with strawberry mousse, and topped with fresh strawberry buttercream frosting. We actually found good ol' fashioned strawberry ice cream (usually can only be found in Neapolitan) to make it a la mode and drizzled more fresh strawberry puree on it.

I need to make this cake my signature dessert.

I'm so lucky to have 6 little sweethearts!

Kaleb and Noé passed out oatmeal cookies to their classmates in honor of the day. Kaleb also got a chocolate rose from a girl in our stake.

(Our fun fortunes: You will have good luck in business affairs.)

(A good deed will make you feel good.)

Noé was the most spoiled with this darling bunny and a sweet card from her crush. The scarf she's wearing was also a gift from him at Christmas time. She also gave him a box of chocolates and a darling card.