Valentinetastic.

We don't do homemade valentines every year. It doesn't always come together. This year, for some reason, I was on top of it and got them done early. We found both of these ideas on The Crafty Crow, which is definitely my go-to site for adorable kids' crafts. Love it over there.

For T's Valentines we decided to do these monsters, originally posted at Chef Messy. It took us a couple afternoons, while S was at school. He did a great job tearing shapes, drawing faces, and placing hearts. I think these are so stinking cute!

For his classmates we did a generic, "Happy Valentines Day!" For family members we did a more personal message.

Of course, in a kid's world, no valentine is complete without candy. So we added chocolate hearts on top of the paper hearts, using glue dots. Done.

For S, we used an idea that was originally posted on Design Mom. Mad Lib Valentines!

The original idea didn't include any candy, but we wanted to give a little something, so we bought stick candy at Cracker Barrel and wrapped the Mad Libs around those. So every kid gets one stick of candy, one Mad Lib sheet to fill out, and we wrapped those in decorative paper and embroidery floss.

The blog post at Design Mom included a pdf of tags to cut out and tie to the scroll. S wrote his "to" and "from"'s on the back of the tags.

Here they are all together. I think they look super.

Valentines with boys can be a challenge. They don't want anything to do with the typical Valentine motifs of hearts, flowers, or lacy doilies. So I was happy to find these boy-friendly ideas, and happy to help the boys make these Valentines they'll be proud to hand out to their friends.