In yesterday's post I made mention to some arts and crafts time while my mom was in town. The two of us made it our personal mission to find some letters that spelled out Megan's name and hang them in her room.
Through internet searching, I found lots of great ideas, but they wanted $20 a letter for those creations. Um, no. They were very nice, but I wasn't ready to plunk down $100 for something like that. So, on Saturday, I got a pedicure with my friend Jeff, (I know ... save it. I'm a teacher, runner, and tennis coach. My feet would look like the surface of the moon if I didn't get them cleaned up.) who left his gigantic-in-comparison, 5-month-old for a playdate with Megan while we had guy time. Then, after lunch, the project required a trip to our local Michael's. So my Saturday (minus basketball) was pedicures, Michael's, and crafts. Hmm ... having another female in the house HAS affected me.
I can honestly say this was my first venture into Michael's for something other than a picture frame. If I wouldn't have had my mom with me, I definitely would have felt intimidated. During the course of the next 45 minutes, we hemmed and hawed over letter choices, colors, hanging options, etc. Why is it, when it comes to artsy projects, you have exactly what you want in your mind, and yet, nobody produces exactly what you want? They had, literally, 300+ fake floral arrangements for sale, but only TWO types of wooden letters to choose from? Argh.
But, even after picking up glue, paints, and other supplies, we departed having spent just a shade under $30 for our project. That sounded much better. After several hours of sanding the letters down, adding multiple coats of craft paint, gluing them, and putting the hooks on them we were ready. In the picture below, you can even see that I valiantly gave up some of my March Madness hoops watching to finish this process. (Although in the interest of full disclosure, of the 40ish hours of college basketball on TV, I still caught about 35 of them. Hopefully I made Uncle Willy proud)
The finished product came out great. The lighting in these photos doesn't really do it justice, but they look really cute. Megan hasn't fully seen them yet, but I'm sure she'll love them.
3 comments:
The parenting news link items you place on the right side are awesome, Brian. I just read "Slow Parenting... part 2" and was impressed by that father's insight and advice. Yesterday I read about research a physicist did on baby crying.
You not only have managed to share your life and personal insight with us, but you also help us learn new things; this blog thing is amazing!
Who knew you had such a busy day? When I met up with you all for lunch, I thought you and j.d.riel had just been schlepping around all day...
Love the letters! Nice work, dad!
Oh what a fun project!! Might as well keep Michaels as a favorite place to go!
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