We love Valentine’s Day. Our favorite holiday after Halloween. Growing up, I loved making Valentines for friends at school and looking at all the ones my friends made for me. When I had kids of my own, I renewed my love for Valentines – but last year, our school stopped allowing them to be exchanged at school. We still manage to have a lot of fun at home, and find ways to celebrate with friends. I found these cute Valentine doughnuts at Rocco’s for the kids as a fun surprise treat.

We do fun manicures at home with hearts on our nails!

We made these fun crafts for teachers last year. Pick up some paper mache heart ornaments from your local craft store and paint on a thin layer of mod podge. Add tissue paper squares and cover with another layer of mod podge for a shiny clear coat. This was for our visual arts teacher, so we hot glued some letter beads onto it spelling out “in my art era”. Cute as a Valentine, can double as a Christmas ornament.

We found these super cute conversation heart beads on Amazon and used them to make our own headbands. We bought plain headbands on Amazon, although you could certainly use ones you had laying around the house.

Add a little hot glue onto the headband to secure the beads.

How cute are these?

Another fun gift idea would be these Valentine Stanley cup tags. They’re so cute for teens and tweens. You can have them personalized with a name too! They’re available for 30oz. and 40oz. tumblers. Made by SHRH designs.

I saw Amber make these Valentine boxes and thought they were so adorable. After watching, we made our own version – check them out on my Instagram below.

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Our signature snack for Valentines are chocolate covered pretzels. We make them in all colors and with all different kinds of sprinkles, how cute are these ones with the word ‘love’?

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I love the snackle box trend, and think the Valentine snackle box is super cute. We found these at Target and they come in a few different designs. The “LOVE” and the “XOXO” styles were my personal favorite. We filled ours up with some colorful candy, but the sky is the limit on what you could add in here. Other ideas would be: pony and alphabet beads to make a friendship bracelet box, a container os slime on the side and fun sensory mix ins, or for that beauty product teen/tween you could fill the letters with those sample products that come in the flat pouches.

Tie everything up with a cute little bow – we picked this conversation heart ribbon right at our local Dollar Tree – and add a fun gift tag. Cute for kids, friends, teens/tweens and even teachers (make sure to throw a little gift card in too – punch a hole in the corner and tie it on to the bow!)

What would you fill your snackle box with?

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We always dream up new Valentine crafts for our friends. We picked up some inexpensive totes from our local craft store and used our Cricut to outline friend’s names on the bags. We threw in some Crayola fabric markers and it was up to each friend’s imagination to create the bag of their dreams. Perfect for snow gear for school!

For a school craft, we had all of these left over ceramic yogurt cups we were looking to reuse. We decided to make a heart flower bouquet. You will need ceramic yogurt cups, pipe cleaners, cut out hearts, paper shred and play dough.

First step, cut out five of the same size heart shapes. We used a heart shaped cutter, you could use a Cricut or trace hearts and use a scissor. Fold hearts in half. You make multiple flowers in different sizes or colors, use 5 hearts per flower.

Add glue to one half of the heart and stick to one half of a second heart.

When you get to the last heart, secure around pipe cleaner to make the “flower”. Add a ball of play dough in the bottom of the yogurt container to secure the flowers. Push pipe cleaner flowers into play dough to allow to stand up straight. Add as many stems as you’d like.

Share in the comments how you use your left over yogurt containers!

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Are you always trying to keep things new and exciting for your kids? I can never keep up with all the things they see on social media. I tried to get a little crafty and take some inspiration from those ornament wreaths I saw over Christmas. I whipped out the hot glue gun and started attaching the cute heart containers to a heart wreath from the Dollar Store. Each heart had something fun inside (nothing too crazy): a little candy Swedish Fish, Lindt truffles, gummy nerds, sweet and sour hearts. I added some non candy treats as well – some conversation heart stickers, a few heart poppers, a slinky, a disco heart keychain, a small eraser, some ninja bounce balls and even a little Starbucks gift card shaped like a conversation heart. Go as big or as little as you want – but make it fun and personalized.

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When I had my first, I thought I was pretty crafty. I handmade my kid’s Valentine’s for school, no store bought for this family. By the time my second came around, I was still feeling pretty proud of myself, until she came home from school and she had this Valentine of a sheep, like the one above, with pompoms glued on to it. It was from a boy mom, first child. IMPRESSIVE. It stuck with me. Still has, to this day. So when we had to do our 100 days of school craft, for some reason, this popped into my head. I looked up a picture of a sheep on Google, printed it out on my Cricut, ironed it onto a shirt, and hot glued 100 pom poms onto the body of the sheep.

What is your 100 Day of School craft?

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I always like to pick up discounted Valentine merch at the end of the season. I found these at Home Goods last year – filled with gummy candy, which I promptly threw out. The piñatas themselves were still good and we filled them with out own treats (fresh ones!) to give to friends this year. How cute are they?

If you can’t find these, you could also make them inexpensively. Pick up some heart shaped boxes at the end of the season (you can find them at Michaels for about $1) and then cover with fringed tissue paper to make your own.

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Chinese New Year falls on January 29th this year, the year of the snake. It is said that people born in the year of the snake love with their entire hearts. White rabbit candy is very popular, a milk based candy with a soft, chewy texture and a vanilla flavor.

Last year was the year of the dragon, and we did some fun crafts for school. We made paper chain dragons.

Cut out long strips of red paper in equal lengths.

Staple the first strip of paper into a circle and begin making a paper chain. Make as long as you’d like.

Tape the head of the dragon to the first link and the tail of the dragon to the last link. for extra stability, tape or glue popsicle sticks to the head and tail and make the dragon dance.

These toilet paper roll dragons were a fun craft. You will need: empty toilet paper rolls, streamers, pom poms, eyes (either stickers or googly eyes), construction paper, and double sided tape.

Measure out the width of the toilet paper roll and then roll the construction paper to fit completely around the roll. Use double sided tape to attach streamers to one side of the paper (the long side). You can cut into squiggle shapes or leave straight).

Add two pieces of tape to the short sides of the paper.

Roll the paper around the empty toilet paper roll and secure with the double sided tape.

This is what your finished product should look like.

Add two small pieces of tape towards the back for the pom pom eyes and two pieces of tape near the streamers for the nostrils.

This is what the final product should look like. Glue googly eyes to the back set of pom poms or use eye stickers.

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With the school vacation being 92,090,233,643 days long, we were looking for things to do. Lots of things to do. We had some extra supplies from a craft we brought to school, so we used the extra snow globes from the Dollar Store, some glitter, fake snow, beads, and some 50% off ornaments from Target to make these fun little snow globes. You could really use any little figures that you have at home, and any craft supplies – leftover pieces of ribbon, pipe cleaners, pom poms, the sky is the limit on what you could create. And we kept these as dry snow globes, no water needed – but you could always make some with water and add a few drops of glycerin to make things float nicely. Make sure to hot glue the figures to the lid a hot glue the lid closed if you’re using liquid in the snow globe so that little hands don’t mistakenly open the snow globes on your floor! What would you put in your snow globe?

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Happy New Year! We kicked off 2025 with a bang! We decided to celebrate with some fun party gear made with found items! Grab some sun glasses (you know you have a billion of them hanging around from swag bags from birthday parties), headbands (or holiday headwear), pipe cleaners, beads, acrylic jewels, pom poms, and anything else you like!

Wrap the pipe cleaners tightly around the headband (and twist to secure), or secure onto sunglasses with hot glue. Add beads, twist into fun shapes, wrap around cookie cutters to make stars or other shapes, add acrylic gems to the ends! Hot glue pom poms to headband to cover up the base, and try to keep the pipe cleaners light or they will droop and sag. Go wild with your imagination, the sky is the limit!

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I think that when I had my first child I had these holiday visions of the perfect gingerbread house – beautiful icing, rainbow colors, gumdrop roof, peppermint walkway. And then I had my third child and reality set in that frosting ends up EVERYWHERE, its a sticky mess, there are globs and blobs, someone ends up crying (probably me) and the house ends up falling apart halfway through and the kids could care less after minute 5.

So here are my best tips for a clean (if that’s your thing) and stress free (if you even get stressed out about these things) or less stressful, holiday gingerbread experience. First, go ahead and buy that pre assembled gingerbread house. no one is looking and no one is judging. You can get it here. Sure, you can buy more expensive ones, but this is worth every penny. And if anyone is looking THAT closely, you don’t want to be their friend anyway. Another tip, go ahead and buy one that you have to assemble and HOT GLUE GUN that house together, because, let’s be honest, NO ONE eats a gingerbread house that their kids have decorated. I mean those kids have licked their fingers and probably sneezed on it one or six times, you’re putting that out on your holiday table and then throwing that baby out come January 1st.

Same with decorating cookies. You can spend your time in the kitchen making the tasty home made cookies that are super cute and time consuming to cut out and frost, when really, all your kid wants to do it throw some candy on it, lick their fingers (maybe eat 2 cookies) and then you throw the rest out. Maybe your kids could eat more cookies, mine PROBABLY could, but I’m not sticking around or willing to find out.

I mean, do you really want to see their behavior after they eat all this candy?!?! hahaha. So maybe make. one good batch of cutout, frosted cookies, and fake the rest! It’s ok to take some short cuts during this crazy holiday season. And if a complete store bought cookie package is too much, but a pre made cookie dough and roll it out and cut those. Perfect compromise. What is your best holiday shortcut?

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