Old T-shirt bibs

I went through my closet the other day, and I found lots of old T-shirts that are (unfortunately) too small for me...I had been saving them for the time when I will lose that extra 20 lbs and will fit into them again. That was two moves ago and four years in between. I figured it was time to get rid of them.

Some of the shirts have special memories attached to them. I may have not told you, but I was an au pair in Boston for a year back in 1995-1996. (uhm...20 years ago. Yikes!) It has been one of the best experiences of my life. I should write a whole blog post about it. My second host family is family. They took me in like I was one of their own and treated me like family. I love them very much. And, I love the city of Boston. So, my two Boston T-shirts are very special to me.

This is my Boston T-shirt was bought from one of my many visits to the wonderful city of Boston. I had gone exploring my favorite spots in town and ended up in Quincy Market. There was a small souvenir shop that I happened to pop in, and I saw this T-shirt in there. I loved it right away because it was funny and not your regular boring BOSTON T-shirt.

My Boston Red Sox T-shirt I bought one summer when I was taking care of my host family's kids in between au pairs. The family's grandmother was a HUGE sports fan. She loved "her" Red Sox and Bruins. I would watch hockey games with her at night eating peppermint patties or drinking tea and eating the most delicious chocolate chip cookies. I tried to watch baseball games with her, and I appreciated her excitement for the game, but I never truly understood what was going on the field. And, it was soooooooooo slow. However, since I loved the city of Boston and my family very much, I wanted to show my support for the local team, so I ended up getting my very own Boston Red Sox T-shirt.

My San Francisco Giants T-shirt is special because I married into a family that are huge Giants fans. This also fixed the issue that I did not understand the game. I have since then spent hours and hours at the AT&T park or watching the game on TV. I even find myself turning the TV on to watch a game when hubby is not home. I must be a true fan now since I was taken to one of the World Series Games last year. I mean...not just anyone gets to go. So, T-shirt...since we are huge Giants fans in this family, there is no way that I could have just tossed the shirt into the trash can. OMG, no. Absolutely no. It would be like stomping on a flag. You just don't do it. (Or, at least I could have not told anyone about it. Like never.)

So, I couldn't get rid of these three shirts. Not yet.

Instead, I decided to make bibs out of them for my 13 month old. I had saved on Pinterest a blog post how to make bibs out of an old T-shirt. They are awesome.

The bibs are fun, soft, and perfect size. I made some of mine a bit bigger than the pattern so that I could get most of the text fit into the bibs. They cover Matilda very well. She is also pretty cute wearing them.

Rebecca Smith is the woman who came up with the pattern and idea. I printed her pattern for the bib and followed the wonderfully easy tutorial she had posted on the blog. Here is the link to the tutorial again: http://www.alittletipsy.com/2010/11/baby-week-shirt-bib.html

The bibs make me happy. I'm happy that she is now using my old T-shirts. I am happy that I don't need to clean up a huge mess after each meal. I am happy that I get to see these shirts. I am happy that I am upcycling. I am happy that I did not have to lose that 20lbs quite yet to fit into these old T-shirts.

First Birthday

My baby is one. It feels like she should be already three, but at the same time, it feels like we were just in the hospital and brought her home. She was only 2-months-old when we moved to California, and I have to say that I do not remember very much about her first two months of life. Life was so busy, and everything was very emotional. A lot of changes and adjustments have happened during the last 12 months. However, I am happy to report that she is healthy and happy and such a fun addition to our family.

Matilda is not walking yet, but she is an expert on climbing. She climbs on anything. The other day, I found her sitting inside a basket, and I have no idea how she got inside. My guess is that she climbed on her stroller and then rolled into the basket. There were no cries and no complaints. She was just happily sitting in the basket proud of herself for getting in there. It will remain a mystery.

She already has many opinions, and she is not afraid to share them. I have tried to teach her some baby signs, but she refuses to use them. One day, my sister-in-law and I witnessed her sitting on her hands when we tried to get her to sign "all done."  Little stinker.

She has likes and dislikes. She prefers shredded cheese over sliced cheese. She likes her water from sippy cup and only drinks milk from a regular cup when I hold it to her mouth.

The most fun part of her being one is that she understands stuff. For example, if I say, "Matilda. Go find the Tails book (her favorite book at the moment)." She crawls over where the books are and finds it in the pile of books. Then she crawls back to sit on my lap and waits for me to read it for her. She giggles with delight. And, then we read it over and over and over again.

Two weeks ago we had a birthday party to celebrate one-year-old Matilda. The theme was hot air balloons. As always, Pinterest was my source of inspiration. I had also seen my friend's son's preschool use hot air balloon theme for their book fair in the fall. It was so pretty that I was sold.

I like paper invitations. It is fun to stuff the envelopes, write addresses, stick stamps on the envelopes, and put them in the mailbox. I was going to order invitations from Etsy or Zazzle, but then decided that I could easily make them myself. So, I did. I used a hot air balloon cookie cutter as my template for the balloons on the cards, and drew and cut the clouds myself.

I had fun making all the decorations for the party. I sewed fabric letters in rainbow colors to spell "Happy Birthday" and "Matilda is one." I also sewed table runners and fabric garlands to hang. 

But, the most excited and proud I am of all the hot air balloons that I made. I spent hours on gluing paper circles to rice paper lanterns with a hot glue gun. I had never really used a hot glue gun before, and I have to admit, I am a huge fan now. It was so much fun!! I made five hot air balloons that were covered with paper circles - yellow, pink, blue, green and rainbow colored one. The other hot air balloons were colored lanterns. The baskets are brown colored berry baskets that I had bought from Michaels during Valentine's Day thinking that maybe some day I would use them. I used an eraser at the end of a pencil and sparkly gold paint to make dots on the baskets.

The clouds are made from the paper lanterns as well. We (I designated some of the clouds for my father-in-law to finish) glued fiberfill onto the lanterns. It was messy, but the end result was stunning. I got this idea from Pinterest. Someone had used bunch of these clouds as a backdrop for a wedding photo shoot. Such a great idea!

I tried to think of foods that were birthday girl safe and related somehow to our theme of hot air balloons, clouds and rainbows. We had a bucket of "birthday girl recommendations" -- apple sauce, string cheese and graham crackers. We also had little cheese and cucumber sandwich bites, Pirates Booty as clouds, three different salads, and rainbow fruit skewers.

For dessert, we got a chocolate cake from Costco, and I made some Finnish donut holes. Yum! The cake and the cake topper idea came from Craftaholics Anonymous blog. She actually made me realize that not everything needed to be done by me. I could take some shortcuts with food. She had lots of beautiful ideas, and my favorite one was the cake with the little hot air balloons.

I also made some little table decorations. The hot air balloons are made from paper with toothpicks and the clouds are made with styrofoam. I painted them twice with white paint and then added some sparkles.

I had decided that this party was going to be very low key. We had a time frame that we were going to be at the location, and people could stop by any time they wanted and stay as long as they wanted. I also did not want to make lots of plans to entertain the kids. No games. No big deal activities. It was 1-year-old's party. I wanted to keep it simple.

We had a hot air balloon "ride." We had all of our trains set up on the floor. I also chose some of Matilda's favorite books and books related to our theme and put them on the table for the kids to read. Outside, we had set up a bubble table for the kids. They seemed to enjoy that a lot.

 

I wanted to have a craft, so I came up with an idea for the kids to paint their own hot air balloons. I bought small styrofoam balls to be the balloons and white paper cups for baskets. I used bamboo skewers to hold the balls up. My awesome friend (Thank you, Katy!!) hot glued all the hot air balloons together before the party, so when the kids showed up, they could just focus on painting and decorating. We had some sparkly diamond like stickers (Kiitos, Johanna!!) that were used to decorate the baskets. I wish I had pictures of the finished hot air balloons. They came out really nice.

I struggle with the goody bags for parties. When I was a kid, we did not get goody bags for going to someone else's birthday party. I find it odd that you would go to celebrate someone else's day, and you leave with a bag of goodies. You get to eat cake, cookies, ice cream, play games with your friends, and have a wonderful time, and then you also need a bag with goodies. Sigh! I just don't get it. However, I could not have anything for the party goers, so I decided to get a book for each family with kids who came. The book was "Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon." How perfect is that!! Inside the book, I placed a sticker that reminds the readers where they got the book from. Each party goer also got a candy tube of M&Ms.

I had a lot of fun preparing for this party. I cannot wait to start thinking about Olivia's party which luckily is in 6 months. I timed my children's birthdays perfectly...every 6 months there is a party. Yippeee!!

Teacher Appreciation Week

I am a teacher. And, I mean like a real teacher. Not a teacher like I stay home with my children, so I teach them stuff at home. I have a master’s degree in Linguistics with emphasis on TESOL. (TESOL means Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.) I teach grownups who want to learn to speak and use English. I used be a teacher at a community college with a tenure job now I am at home with my beautiful children. Nevertheless, I am still a teacher. I don’t know anything about how it is to be an elementary school teacher. What a day of a Transitional Kindergarten teacher is like with 24 wild 5-year-olds running around in the classroom for four hours five days a week. I don’t know what kind of a workload a 7^th grade teacher has or how much planning a high school teacher must to do to teach a lesson in history. My guess is that all the teachers work very hard and prepare a good amount and spend a lot of energy during the day with the kids that they have in their classroom. I know I did. I was not dealing with kids, but I dealt with adults who sometimes acted like kids. I think that is worse. I have spent countless hours on lesson planning, test making, listening during office hours, grading stacks and stacks of essays, and making sure that everything I need to cover is being accomplished. I know that being a teacher is a lot of hard work.

The idea of teacher appreciation is wonderful. I grew up in Finland. We didn’t have assigned day for a teacher appreciation, but we would bring flowers to our teacher at the end of the school year. Or, we may have remembered our teacher at Christmas. That was a proper way to show your teacher that she or he was appreciated by us and our parents. Last year, we were in New Jersey. In Olivia’s preschool, the parents organized a lunch for the teachers to show them we appreciated them. The parents made the meal and served it and helped in the classrooms while the teachers lunched. I thought that was a nice tradition. Each class also organized a little gift for the teacher. I thought that was appropriate as well.

What I have been hearing this year in anticipation and during the teacher appreciation WEEK bothers me a great deal. A friend of mine told me that in her child’s preschool they were given a list of items for each day of the week to bring for the teacher and the assistant teacher. Monday – teacher’s favorite flower. Tuesday – teacher’s favorite dessert. Wednesday – teacher’s favorite location for a gift card. Thursday – teacher’s favorite color. Friday – teacher’s favorite candy. Another friend mentioned that they also got a similar list. I spoke with another mom who was overwhelmed by the teacher appreciation week because she was the one who had volunteered to take care of it all for her daughter’s first grade class not realizing that the PTA was going to send out a list of things that each class must do for the teacher during the week. This list also was demanding and presumptuous. 

These lists bother me. What happened to a genuine desire to remember your teacher with what you thought was a nice way to remember her or him. The idea that someone (teacher, PTA, room parent) is telling me that I have to buy a bouquet of yellow and white tulips for Monday and $50 gift card to Nordstrom to bring in on Thursday doesn’t sit well with my stubborn Finnish personality. I think that a homemade card from the child and a bouquet of flowers is a nice way to say “I appreciate you.” Or, how about actually saying it on a November Friday during pick up – “Ms. McCarthy. I think you are doing a great job. We are so happy you are Olivia’s teacher.” 

I understand where the lists are coming from. I have gotten my own share of Santa’s head coffee mugs or key chain from Chicago or odd tin of cookies, but I have also received beautiful Korean dolls or Chinese jewelry from my students which I still keep as my favorite memories of my days of being a community college instructor. I cherish the few special items I have received, and I have gotten rid of the Santa mug and key chain. Mostly, it was the thought that counted for me. I have a lot of friends who are elementary level teachers. My guess is that everyone in that group of friends would not send a list of favorite things home with the kids and assume they would be getting a $50 gift card to Nordstrom. (I am sure they would love to get 20 of these cards, but they would never say it.) So, I understand why these lists have been created, but I don’t understand the expectation that everyone will follow the list. It should be a guide not a demand. I haven’t heard about these teacher appreciation week lists anywhere else. There is a lot of money around where we live, but it is not in everyone’s pocket. To assume that every family can pitch in as much as the next person is not feasible.

I don’t like these lists. In my opinion, they make the teachers look greedy and take away from the idea of wanting to remember and appreciate your teacher authentically.

 I love the idea of appreciating your teacher, but it should be done so that it is genuine. And, my guess is that most teachers would agree with me.