Valentines

M doesn't go to daycare so we didn't have any little friends to make Valentines for this year.  Instead, we made some for a few of our relatives.  These were fairly easy to do and M had a pretty good role in helping to make them, which is always my goal.

We started by gathering a bunch of our pink and red construction paper sheets and painting them.

Next I traced M's hands on cardboard and cut out several of each hand from the paintings he made:

 Last, I cut out some hearts and glued a left and right hand onto the heart.  We had extra hearts so I made a decoration for the door to our basement as well.  We tend to hang a lot of M's art there:

On the back of each I wrote them out and then M "signed" them with crayon.  There's always something I don't get a picture of!

magnet cut-outs

This is basically a mom project but M has enjoyed playing with the product so I'm including it here.  I originally intended to make some of these magnet cut-outs of friends M doesn't see all that often.  He loves looking through his photo book and naming people he knows so I thought this would be fun for him too.  I haven't actually gotten to that point yet but I did make some of M and our immediate family. He loves pulling them off the fridge and putting them back on.

I started with these magnetic sheets.  They work just like the magnetic strips except they're 4x6 size so you could just attach a regular sized photograph to make it magnetic:

Next, I cut the picture down and cut a similarly shaped section of the magnetic sheet.  Then I attached it to the magnetic sheet.

I did end up wasting some scraps this way but since the backing of the magnets have one sheet on adhesive this was the best way I could figure to do it.  After the trimmed down photo was on the magnetic sheet, I cut around the people to make the cut-out.  Very easy and a big hit with M!

photo book

This is M's photo book...

I made it for him when he was about 4 months old.  M has a lot of family members and friends that he doesn't see on an everyday basis because they live too far away.  I thought this would be a good way to keep him familiar with faces.  Each page has a photo of him and the person and a label with their name on it.  M loves looking through this book.  In fact, about 2 months ago he started being able to point to the pages for my husband and I and say "mama" or "da," which is really great to see.  This was super fast and easy to make (cheap photo album from Walgreens and a pack of labels) and it's one of M's favorite things to pull out and look at.

If I was going to make a second one I would look for an album that has pages that are held in a little stronger than this one.  Our book is very "loved" and we've had a few pages pulled out (although they're just as easily taped back in).