Every year we make homemade Valentine cards, and now that the kids are getting older they are capable of craftier creations.  This year we thought about their current interests, and then scrounged around Pinterest for matching Valentine’s ideas.  There are plenty of creative people out there, and we are grateful that so many are willing to share!

Sam is completely obsessed with music these days.  He has loaded up his iPod with Maroon 5, Kesha, and Justin Timberlake songs.  Knowing this, I wasn’t surprised when he decided to make iPod Valentines!

They were incredibly easy.  First he taped a some plastic lacing string (to look like headphone wires) to a box of Valentine confection hearts.  We then wrapped the box with a strip of colored paper, and taped Hershey kisses to the ends of the lacing strings.  (Some people used Rolos or mini peanut butter cups instead, but Sam thought the Hershey’s looked the most like earbuds.)  From there he simply glued a playlist and controls to the front (here is the template I made), and he wrote his “to” and “from” messages on the back.  We worked assembly line style and cranked them out in no time!

The iPods are a good Valentine for older kids.  Sam made a few extras so I could pass them out to my library aides at school, and I can vouch for the fact that they were even “cool” to 8th graders.

Maggie’s current obsession is her wooden barn and its hodgepodge menagerie of occupants.  Here is what her room looks like after a night of “sleeping”:

The choice was obvious:  animal Valentines!  We went to Michael’s and found some notecard-sized paper with a variety of animal prints, and also bought tubes of miniature animals there.  They run about $10 for 12 animals, but with the 40% off coupons it isn’t too bad.  We also needed white paper for speech bubbles and some of the plastic lacing thread to tie on the animals.

The result was a wide variety of individualized Valentine cards:

It was fun coming up with different sayings for each little animal, and Maggie wrote out all of the speech bubbles by herself.

For the most part, we let her little spelling errors slide.  However, this cute little elephant card was the result of a redo:

Her first draft said, “Adam, I lick you a ton!”

Big difference.

With that near catastrophe averted, we closed the books on another successful Valentine’s Day.  I feel the love!