I’m not a huge Valentine’s Day person as far as the pressure to give pricey gifts, or have the biggest flowers delivered during the work day. Not that I mind gifts or flowers, but I just think those things have so much more meaning when given on a random day rather than on a day that dictates the need for those things. On the other hand, I absolutely love the idea of having a reminder that we should showcase the love and appreciation we have for others. We can all be better about this, and sometimes the reminder is helpful.

So in the spirit of showing love, I decided to do a few special things this year.  First, I sent off some sweet little items in snail mail on behalf of Peanut for her first Valentine’s Day. Inspired by this adorable pin on Pinterest, I decided to mail “hugs” to our closest family members.

I started by tracing Peanut’s adorable little hand, and cutting it out to use as a template.  The tracing part was a bit challenging since she doesn’t quite sit still at this point, but I was able to get it close enough to count. Then I took some curling ribbon and stretched it out from one of Peanut’s hands to the other so that I could get the length of her wingspan for the “hug”, and cut multiple lengths of ribbon. I used the hand template to cut out multiple pairs of hands out of plain white paper. While I was doing that, I roped the husband into helping, and had him cut out multiple pairs of hearts from pink cardstock.

Then I simply took some tape and pinned the ribbon between the pink heart and the hand. I realized that I better pay attention when taping the hands down so that I made sure to position them correctly (thumbs in).

I typed up a simple little poem and printed them four to a page so they would fit into the simple Valentine’s Day cards I had bought. Of course I had to include a photo as well 🙂

The other thing I was excited about for Valentine’s Day was a surprise for the husband. We decided not to buy each other gifts this year, but I still wanted to do something special for him that wouldn’t necessarily cost any money. I found these amazing printables by Haute Chocolate, and printed out a few pages of them. I decided to write on the back of each tag something that I love about him. After cutting them all out, I taped them in random places around the house for him to find when he woke up on Valentine’s day.

An example: I wrote on the back of one of the tags “I love how you support my Blue Bell addiction”, and taped it to one of the multiple Blue Bell ice cream containers in our freezer so that he’d see it when he went to grab the cooler bag to put Peanut’s milk in before heading to the sitter’s house that morning.