Valentine's Activites and Shelly the Turtle

We had a fun valentine's week! We started out by decorating these cute little mailboxes that I picked up at target so that we could send each other valentines. James loved checking his whenever the flag was up! I tried to get him to leave some for Anthony in his, but James couldn't resist the candy and he would sneak over to "look at it" after a few minutes and then all of a sudden, Anthony's candy would be gone. I wonder how that happened? :)

We had a Valentine's day play date with some friends from church and I made these valentines for James to give out. They also did a bunch of other cute crafts and activities, although all James wanted to do was to go out and play in their backyard. Boys!

While we were weeding out our garden, I found a small box turtle. We decided to surprise James with it after naptime and let it visit us for a few days. Here he is discovering it: 

Her vacation home for the next few days. We decided to call her "Shelly":

 

When we decided to let her go, I told James that she had to go back outside so that she could find a Daddy turtle and have baby turtles. He was totally fine with that, thank goodness! I put her in our backyard and then a few hours later went outside to play with James. I didn't see her anywhere, so I let the dogs come out with us. When we came back inside, James started yelling, "Brownie has Shelly!". Uh oh. Somehow Brownie found her while we were outside and was chewing on her! I picked her up and her entire front side was chewed up and it looked like the underside of her shell was caved in. James gave me a sad face and said, "Brownie chew her face off?". It was traumatizing! I put her back outside on the other side of the fence so that the dogs couldn't reach her and when checked later she was gone. Sooooo maybe she survived and crawled away? Or maybe another animal got to her? Either way, I felt really bad :(