Kid-friendly Valentine's! - as Jules is going

Anyone else get their 1st "LIST" this year?

I did. It was back at Christmas time and my 3-year-old came home from Cubbies with a list of classmates on it. I wasn't sure what this mean. I had volunteered to bring cupcakes. Did this list mean I was to put their names on individual cupcakes for them? Nope. Gifts. For Each Child. That's what it meant. It has begun. Gone were the days of nursery kids and workers being pleasantly surprised by my children offering simple gifts to them for the holiday. Now there was a LIST. Crazy! I guess there's no turning back and no more forgetting...

We made simple gifts with printed tags for Christmas and, now anticipating the LIST for the Valentine's Day party, I was Ready! I'd been clicking through Pinterest for ideas. Not wanting to spend too much money on top of the cupcakes for the this party as well, I finally found something we already had enough of at home, created my own tag on Picnik {entire site FREE and Unlimited until April 19, 2012} using combination of things I'd seen before, and spent ~$3.00 more to get this finished product:

Gold fish! The kid-friendly, semi-healthy snack that we had a GIANT SAM's Club size container of already at home. I bought 1 box of Reese's Pieces ($1.00) and the cheapest plastic bags I could find at Wal-Mart (maybe $2.00). I dumped tons of fish into a bowl and gave my girls measuring spoons to scoop them into the bags I'd opened.

{Some where a bit fuller than others so I evened them out later} They of course were allowed to snack on a few while making their friends gifts. I went back later and added the not as healthy chocolate pieces to the bags. You could of course put more than the ~8 pieces than I did but I was trying to keep it healthier and DID NOT add the chocolate Peanut Butter candies to the bags going to the nursery {Doctors do not want babies under 2-years-old to have peanut butter in case of fatal allergic reactions!}. I folded the bags shut, folded the sides in to keep them fresh, and then stapled the tags on top and bottom to each bag. We wrote each child's name in the top corner and "from ___" in the bottom corner. We also have some blank ones for any visitors that may be there that night.

{You could always punch a hole in the tag and tie the bag shut with some ribbon looped through the tag's hole.}