Christmas Gifts

This year, gift giving was easy thanks to Oliver.  Everyone got very personal gifts from us.  I've been excited to share my most favorite though... and now that everyone has received their gift, I can post pictures!!!

We went to a paint-your-own-pottery place and thank goodness teeny tiny was asleep because it was so helpful during the process.  We painted 8 plates and 4 mugs assembly style.  My sister met me there and she was in charge of both rocking the boy so he would stay asleep and keeping track of which plate/mug had which layer of paint so we'd know which one needed to be painted next.  

When Oliver woke up I let him finger paint a plate - so. much. fun.

Without further chatter... behold, our penguin plates!  I. love. them.  They turned out so much better than I'd hoped!  The white was really hard to work with and a few ended up a little wonky like the one below, but overall I was SO pleased with them.  I kept adding to them, i.e. black rim, snow in the rim... a little part of me wanted to write something cute like 'Happy Feet' or something, but I decided to stop while I was ahead!  

(pic taken from my phone - will try to get a better one later)

... it seemed only fitting to have footprint bags for the plates. :)

They were a hit and I think everyone loved them as much as we did!  We will definitely be doing something like this every year.  It was so funny at the paint place, so many people looked at me like I was a nut since I was painting black footprints.  One lady even commented that she'd seen another person make a plate but they used a light blue for their baby - I had to laugh before telling her that I was making it into a penguin.  I showed her the picture I'd seen on Pinterest that someone had done on paper and she then said, 'Oooh.'  Ha!  

As I was painting, I did have to wonder - at what age is a footprint not cute anymore?  Maybe when it's too big to fit on the plate?  I plan to move on to hand prints as soon as he's old enough to understand what it means to 'keep your hand open,' but until then I'm stuck with the feet.  And don't even try to tell me that foot prints are never not cute because I highly doubt my mom would be excited about a platter with my foot print painted on it!  :)