This non candy valentine was inspired by one of our beach visits. The kids love collecting shells. They love looking, holding them up to their ear to hear the ocean, touching their rough edges, and smelling the beach on them. Shells are pretty awesome. By the way if you don’t live close to a beach to collect your own shells I’ve seen shells sold at crafts stores like Michael’s*.
We went to the beach and I snapped a few candid photos of my daughter running around collecting shells. I purposely had her wear a little bit of red (these were for Valentine’s Day after all). She took this blazer off after I took some pictures because it was warm. She is generally a good sport for cooperating with pictures.  I added some text in photoshop and printed the 4 x6 pictures out at Costco.

My daughter picked out which shells she was giving to her friends and taped them on the photo. Easy, fun, unique and inexpensive Valentine. She loved being so involved with the whole process of “her valentine’s” that she was going to personally give. This could easily be done without the photo and just some scrapbook paper as well. A week after we gave out these valentine’s we discovered Huguenot Park and found some pretty big shells and even an intact conch shell. That would be even better if we could find GIANT shells to give out!  Did you see what my son and I gave out for Valentine’s Day this year?

Shell you be my Valentine?

* (update 3/5/2015: I was told by a reader that they have seen shells at the dollar store)

My son gave out an army man valentine for a Valentine’s Day party we got to attend. When my husband saw what our kids were giving he said, “Do people not do candy anymore?” I said, “variety.” It’s nice to have variety and I knew they would be getting plenty of candy. If you want to see what I gave see previous post. (I got to give some out!!) We had army men left over from the dollar store for another project. I went to Hobby Lobby and found camouflage paper and looked up army fonts on dafont.com. The military looking font is called “Army Rust.” I simply taped the army men to the back of the paper. These were so easy and inexpensive to put together. Plus, we had some fun lining up the army men and reorganizing them. He was thrilled to hand out valentine’s for the first time this year. There are still a lot of army men left in the bag so this might even be next year’s valentine too (as long as there are different kids mom’s at the party I’m ok doing this).