Valentines on a stick

It's a bit silly how much work Valentine's Day has become if you have children.  EVERYONE in their classes must get a Valentine of some sort, (the handouts emphatically say) so if you have more than one child, and they go to more than one school, you can end up making 50 (!!!) some odd favors to hand out.  To 2 and 3 year olds who really could not care less, and whose entire concept of Valentine's day revolves around how much sugar content it has.

Nonetheless, I didn't want to be that Mom who was the grinch who didn't give anything (although seriously, is anyone keeping track of that--I know I have no idea who gave what) and so I pulled out a leftover bag of lollipops from Youngest's last birthday and a few crafting supplies and got to work.

Using my hole punch I punched out a kafillion pink circles.  Then I stamped "With Love" on one of them and wrote "From..." and each girl's name underneath. 



I wanted the girls to participate but their abilities and interest in this project were pretty limited, so I decided to make it their job to adhere stickers to the other circle.

This led to a lot of sloppy overlapping and stickers stuck on my coffee table (despite the newspaper I put down) but it was fun, got them to participate, and they made it about 1/2 way through all the circles before they lost interest all together, so I didn't have that many left to finish.

Now I had a stamped circle and a stickered circle.  I put one on each side of the lollipop, grabbed my trusty stapler, and stapled the two circles together over the candy.  Here's the finished product:

Acceptably cute, sort of handmade, kids participation, and relatively quick.  Favors I can live with.

What did you do for your Valentines this year?