I think about this time last year, I mentioned my distaste for Valentines Day.

But having a kid always gives you a chance to find a new appreciation for things you might not have even liked before.  I always ask myself if there’s an opportunity to do something fun that I would actually like to do…so I asked Myla what we could design for V-day.

“Sugar skulls!” she said (she has seen Book of Life a few times lately).  I considered how to make that work for valentines, and even asked friends to help with puns (like “no bones about it,” or “don’t be a bonehead” or something), but we decided to go a whole other route after we saw this:

They’re cute little candy huggers, and they’re perfect!  But since I have neither a custom cutter or the patience to hand-cut 25 of them with an x-acto blade, I tweaked the idea a little, and we went with her second idea…

MONSTERS!

They’re so easy.  Yeah, these look a little wonky, but that’s because I hand-cut them with scissors while I watched TV, and it took all of about 10 minutes.  If your kid’s got mad scissor-skills (ours does), you could even let her help…(unless she’s SUPER engrossed in drawing her own imaginary superhero robots…which ours was, at the time).  Kids don’t care if it’s wonky, though, because: MONSTERS AND CANDY.

A few glue dots  and some Dove heart candies later, and they were all done!  I’ll even pass along my monster template, and you can feel free to customize it, if you like!  Just right click it and save it to your desktop.  Stick a glue dot on the belly, press the heart candy down, stick a glue dot on top, and fold the hands over…And BOOM!  Sort-of instant valentines.

And if you’re not into these monsters, check out the monster ones I did last year.  That post also has links to my friend Stowe’s site, which is full of some fabulously geeky valentines.

So there you go!  Whether you can’t wait for your roses and chocolate, or you’re a humbug like me, I wish you all a very happy Valentine’s Day!

(…Or at least I wish you lots of candy.  Whichever you prefer.  …Mmmm, candy.)