TyBro-Style: Valentine's Day!

Time to start thinking about Valentine's Day!

I know, I know - it's still a month away...

Hey - at least I waited until after Christmas, unlike all the ridiculous retailers in town!

I tend to start early cuz I love making the kids' Valentines for their friends, but it takes time.

Last year, the kids' Winter Break coincided with Valentine's Day.  So instead of slipping Valentine's into their lunch boxes for the days leading up to V-day, I set these little mini mailboxes out on the table and filled them with goodies/love notes each morning.
And put the flag up to let them know that there was mail inside, of course.

(Thanks, Mama G. for the A-Ha revelation of "delivering" the goods at home!)

"You've Got Mail"!
They loved waking up to find mail in their mailboxes. 

And sometimes throughout the day, too.

They decorated these mini mailboxes so long ago but we still had them in our stash!

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Last year was also unique for us because we moved to OK from FL over the Christmas break.  So when we were making our Valentines, the boys decided they wanted to send some to their former FL classmates as well as their new OK classmates... 

I'm not a Math person, but that's a lot of Valentines.

So we went with this idea - borrowed from a very talented photographer friend of mine 

(Traci of Traci Meyer Photography) in the Hudson Valley area (NY).  

My photography skills pale in comparison to Traci's, but we did ok!

 The trick to making these appear 3-D-ish is to take the photo from above the subjects 

... not sure if I nailed that part but I get the idea ... in theory!  

* Had the boys hold their hands up, as if they were holding a balloon, and *snap*.  Got the shot.  

* Printed enough copies at CVS to cover two sets of classmates for each boy.  

* Bought a ginormous bag of dum-dum lollipops.

* With an exact-o knife, made two slits big enough to slip the sucker through and voila - done!

 These were so easy that we made some for the Grandparents, too.

Had fun snapping photos that day and the the photo on the left was of the boys spelling out 

L-O-V-E in sign language.  We made that one for Daddy!

Not really such an easy task for little fingers!

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Will post this year's project when they're done...