Because of my work schedule, I’m not the most participatory mom when it comes to school events and activities (though I try to be as present as I can). I’ve made it a tradition, though, to always do a little something extra when it comes to Valentine’s Day. Despite the unfortunate (or fortunate as the case may be!) collision between Valentine’s Day and the birth of a new member of the Jacks family, I wasn’t going to let this year slip by without a fight.

This weekend, I found a cute and simple printable, and I coupled that with a sweet treat that the girls could easily make to create our yearly class Valentines. If I had been more creative, I would have incorporated the idea of the new baby… but this was Valentine’s Day survival, so I was thrilled to find something easy that would work and look like it took more effort than it did!

First, I got some very simple card stock ($3.50) for the printable I found. Unlike some of the printables I’ve used, this was completely uncomplicated and I only needed scissors to cut the tags up. In the past, I’ve had to spend some quality time carefully aligning paper in the printer and using paper cutters — often sweating and wasting failed attempts as I went. It was nice to have things work so smoothly this year. Then I took a quick trip to Michael’s and grabbed some Wilton’s meltable vanilla flavored candy drops ($4.99), and some glassine bags ($2.99). I already had sprinkles at home. We found some strawberry wafers on sale at the grocery store ($2.99) and brought everything home to do the assembly.

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I lined a wire rack with parchment paper and melted the candy drops in the microwave following the instructions on the container. Then we dipped each wafer into the hot candy and the girls sprinkled the hot dipped wafer with sprinkles. The hardest part was making sure that no little hands touched the completed wafers while they were drying. Then we placed a wafer in each bag with the nice side facing up and stapled a printable tag to the top. If I had more time, I would have done a two hole punch on each bag and threaded a ribbon through to seal it… but there’s no time for that this year!

Total project time was somewhere around an hour for 50 Valentines. Total cost was $14.47 or about 29 cents per Valentine.

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What are you doing for your child’s classmates for Valentine’s Day?