What do you get...???

What do you get when you take an empty coffee can, a used Chinet cup from a party the weekend before, some pine cones, pine needle clusters, pebbles, last year's day lily flower stems, an X-acto knife and alotta hot glue???

A fairy happy girl*, and a pretty snazzy fairy house**!

*Who decided to paint her face like a cheetah.

**No, I've never made a fairy house before...but the Squirt is talking "fairy town" now. Oy.

Birthday gifts

I don't know about you, but having your child invited to classmate's birthday parties is great...but also a bit stressful. To come up with a fun, age appropriate gift, that doesn't break the bank (especially since there seems to be a slew of them lately) can be a challenge.

With the challenge set firmly in front of me, I think of my own daughter and what she loves (besides everything!). Art. Creativity. Plain and simple. So this is what we have come up with...and it's knocked it out of the park!

Total cost...$12. Not bad!

A Blanket

A piece of cloth or two (or more depending) sewn together, thrown on a bed...It seems so simple, doesn't it? But not when a grandma makes it...then it's so much more.

Tonight as I snuggled in with my sweet one, she started to kick all the covers off, and only wanted "the flowers" on, and her "cozy"...that's when it hit me, in that stillness...both of these blankets were made by my grandmothers. "Flowers" was made for me many moons ago by my "Regular" Grandma* and was my favorite...it kept me warm and cool all at the same time. "Cozy" was made especially for the Squirt when she was newly with us because Great Gram thought she needed a cozy blanket to snuggle.

So tonight as sleep came over my girl not only was she warm, but also blanketed in love...a love of one grandma I'm so happy she gets to experience and another she will only know through her mother's own quirkiness. A blanket may be just cloth to some...but some cloth is so much more.

P.S. As I sit here writing this all down, another thing has dawned on me...my girl has 3 grandmas too...2 "Regulars" and a Great...lucky girl.

*I was lucky enough to have had 3 grandmothers growing up, so to differentiate them they had different names, which I gave them...and "Regular" was anything but...which is another post in itself.