DIY Baby's 1st Birthday Highchair Decoration

We can't believe our grandson is one already!  His parents are having a big first birthday celebration for him and asked for some help with it.  One thing they asked for was a handmade highchair decoration just to have it be a little more special than one they could buy.  We are always excited to be able to help especially because we are snowbird grandparents and can't be there to help on a day to day basis.

But even though we are snowbird grandparents we don't miss out on any of our grandson's special moments.  Our son and daughter-in-law make sure we don't miss a thing.  Thanks to them, videos, photo sharing and FaceTime, we watched him roll over, begin to crawl, heard his first belly laugh, everything.  We also appreciate how our grand baby's parents make sure to plan lots of get-togethers with us, either at our house, their house or meeting on vacation.

We are very happy with how this first year went and even happier to be celebrating our little guy's number one birthday with him.

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Materials

Card Stock

Felt
Stick-On Velcro

Fabric Adhesive

Glue 

Scissors
Edging Scissors

Black Marker

Stapler

Instructions For Characters

1.  Find royalty-free clip art of characters.  (There are a number of places you can find them.)  Copy them on a to blank Word document.

2.  Resize your clip art, if needed, to the size you want.  (About 5 inches in diameter as shown.)

3.  Print your picture (Elmo) in black and white on white card stock.

4.  Staple your print (anywhere but on the character's face) to a piece of black card stock and cut along outline of entire head.  Stapling the pieces of card stock together helps the pieces not to move so that you can have two identical pieces when you are done.  Put black piece to the side for now.

5.  Take the print and cut out the mouth and cut off the nose and eyes.

6.  Trace the face piece onto red card stock and cut out.

7.  Glue this piece over the black cutout.

8.  Cut out the eyeballs of the eye piece, trace this piece onto white card stock then glue in place on top of the black cutout.

9.  Trace the nose onto orange card stock and glue in place.

8.  Outline face and features with black marker.

Follow these instructions for Cookie Monster minus the nose!

Instructions For Number Circle

1.  Print number on card stock and cut out.

2.  Cut out 5 circles, using cups and bowls of varying sizes, with the biggest being about 5" in diameter.

3.  Use scissors or edging scissors to create interesting edges.

4.  Glue number on smallest circle and then glue circles on top of each other.

Instructions For Banner

1.  Cut out six 1" wide strips lengthwise from an orange piece of felt.

2.  Use the fabric adhesive to glue 3 pieces end to end, overlapping about a 1/2 inch.  Repeat with the other 3 pieces to wind up with two 30+ inch strips.

3.  Cut out three 1 1/2" wide strips, the length of the felt piece, of each color: red, yellow, blue, green and orange.

4.  Use the fabric adhesive to glue these strips to one of the long strips.

5.  After all the strips are glued in place, take the second long strip and glue it on top of first strip, hiding the edges of the hanging strips.

6.  Use stick-on velcro to attach character pieces and number circle to banner.  (It makes it easier to transport if the pieces can be removed from the banner.)

7.  Use velcro to attach the banner to the highchair.

This idea can work with any birthday theme.  Just print the characters or pictures that work for your party and coordinate the banner with colors to match.



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Decorating With Vacation Memories

I can't believe that the vacation we waited so long for, our Mediterranean Cruise, is now just a memory.  But what a wonderful memory it is.  One we will never forget.  And just in case we do start to forget, we made sure we took plenty of pictures to jolt our memories.  Another memory jolter is the souvenirs we brought home with us.  

I brought home at least one souvenir from each country we visited.  A couple of the souvenirs were Christmas ornaments.  Some of my favorite souvenirs are the Christmas ornaments I've gotten over the years on special vacations.  We love reliving those vacations as we hang each ornament on our Christmas tree.

Sometimes I find other Christmas items that make me happy when I decorate my house at Christmastime.  This year, I found a santon that I knew would make me smile every time I decorated with it each Christmas.  

Before I left on vacation I researched the things I should seek out in each country to bring home.  In France, one of the items were a santon.  They are little figurines that are used to decorate a nativity.  We found a shepherd boy that we loved.  He didn't fit into our nativity, because our Jesus, Mary and Joseph are very big and look like giants next to him, but he looks right at home next to a house that decorates our shelf at Christmastime.

In Montenegro, I found a very beautiful and colorful Santa and he fits in perfectly with the two that I have already.  He's the Santa in the middle!

Four years ago we celebrated my mom's 94th birthday by going to Japan and brought 20 of our friends and family with us,  My friends, who live in Japan, were nice enough to arrange an overnight trip for us to the countryside where two of them live.  They rented a bus and planned a full day of activities.

The restaurant they reserved for us to have lunch in was a wonderful experience for all of us.  We had a traditional lunch served in bento boxes and sat cross legged on a tatami floor while we ate it.

On our way out of the restaurant, my daughter Lisa noticed a collection of owls sitting in trees of different sizes and they were for sale!  Me and my friend, Heidi were right behind Lisa when she saw them and we stopped to buy one along with Lisa.

I have my owls sitting on our kitchen counter.

Lisa has hers, the tallest of the three, on her fireplace mantle.

And I love the way Heidi has hers sitting on a shelf along with her other vacation memories.

My mom is Japanese and that is the reason we all wound up in Japan to celebrate her birthday.  Because we have lots of family and friends there, I have been visiting Japan regularly since my first trip when I was 12.  I have special memories of  spending the entire summer there visiting family and friends, seeing the sights and shopping!

I love shopping in Japan.  Everything is so kawaii (cute).  One thing I loved to buy was the kokeshi dolls.  My collection decorates our guest room in Florida.

My newest collection, which is not much of a collection yet, are wood signs I find in souvenir stores on our travels.  I got a couple on two separate trips we made to Gatlinburg, TN.  I have plans to have a collage of them decorating my kitchen wall one day.

Lots of times when I enter someone's house, the thing that catches my eye happens to be something they picked up on vacation somewhere.  I love the way my sister, Sandie, decorated one of kitchen walls with a small shelf that holds the cutest little houses she found in Monterosso, one of the five towns that make up Cinque Terre in Italy.  The map of the area that she put above it works so nice 

together.

I also like the way Sandie used the photos she took, while on her family vacations, to create two fun collages.  One wall of her living room is decorated with her pictures of Italy...

and she has her pictures of Japan on the other.

One of my favorite decorations in my home is in the laundry room.

For almost twenty years we would go camping for a week during the summer with a group of friends.  Many of our trips were planned around beach towns.  I am not sure where I got these bright, colorful fish but all the memories of those fun times come rushing back to me every time I see them.

I also enjoy the two hanging coastal decorations that we have in our screen room.  One

we got on our vacation in Mexico and the other is a souvenir from our daughter and son-in-law's beach vacation.  I liked the way our souvenir from Lisa and Pete looked hanging in the room so much that when I saw something similar in Mexico, I had to buy it.  I do have room for a couple more so I  keep a lookout for one when I am near a beach.

Sometimes the only souvenirs I come back with from a beach vacation are shells and sand.   It's amazing how many ways you could use shells and sand to decorate.  I've seen both in lamp bases and other things made out of clear glass containers.  My Aunt Joyce uses shells to decorate frames around mirrors.

I turned our free souvenirs into beautiful decorations that we enjoy every day.  We collected sand from about 10 beach vacations and I turned it into sand art  (You can find out how I did it here!) and simply put our shells in a small glass bottle.   I display them together in my bathroom.

If you are going to decorate your home anyway, why not do it with souvenirs that will remind you of the wonderful time you had on vacation!

Do you decorate your home with your vacation memories?  We would love to hear about it!

Beach Vacation Sand Art

Do you save sand from your beach vacations? I know I do. Read this post for an idea of what to do with your collection.

Read this post, How To Easily Protect Your Property While Traveling, before your next beach vacation.

One of my favorite souvenirs to bring back from vacation is the sand from our beach vacations.  I never realized how different sand is from each other until I started collecting and saw them side by side.  I collected a lot of sand over the years and was even given sand by my daughter, Lisa, when she went to California.  What I did when I finally decided to do something with the collected sand, was to put them in separate glass bottles.  I soon had too many bottles and nowhere to display them.  My second idea was to turn them into ornaments for our Christmas tree.  I bought small baby rattles at A.C. Moore that could be filled with candy for a baby shower.  I labeled them and then filled them with the sand.  The ornaments were too heavy for the branches of the tree and didn't look right.  My third try at displaying the sand is finally something I am happy with.  I like how the sand art turned out so much that I am starting to collect more sand to make another one.

I always have a bottle of water with me when I go to the beach.  I've found that the easiest way for me to bring sand home is in that water bottle.   After I drink the water I dry the bottle out as best as I can.   I try to put only clean sand in the bottle.    I  scoop up a handful of sand and just sift through it to get dried seaweed and anything else out that I don't want in the sand.   When I'm happy with how the sand looks,  I pour it into the bottle.  

If you want to remember where your sand came from make sure you label your bottle or container.  I keep a list of the beaches where the sand in my bottle came from.  Starting from the bottom:  Labadee, Haiti; 7 Mile Beach, Grand Cayman; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Horseshoe Bay Beach, Bermuda; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Outer Banks, NC; Ochos Rio, Jamaica; Santa Monica, California; Cozumel, Mexico; La Jolla, San Diego; Carolina Beach, North Carolina; Long Beach Island, New Jersey.

Before I started pouring the sand into the cute heart bottle someone gave me, I lined up my containers of sand to compare the color and texture.  The more contrast in the color or texture, when you are layering, the better your sand art will look.   I used a funnel to slowly direct the sand into the bottle.  

Be careful handling the bottle when it is not completely filled.  Unfortunately, my bottle was not filled by the time we had to move from New York to North Carolina.   I tried to hold onto it as best as I could but the sand shifted around towards the top and the sand from Mexico and San Diego blended together.  

I am excited about making my next bottle but I need a lot more sand and to find a cute bottle for it.  Guess I will have to go on more beach vacations!

Bottle Two

I knew I wanted my second bottle of sand to be the largest bottle in my sand/shell display. I saved up more than enough sand for it.

I lined up all these bottles and bags in the order of how I wanted to add them into my new bottle. I tried to make sure similar colors were separated by contrasting colors. 

 

This is the larger bottle I picked for my second sand art.

Now it was time to pour the sand. I used a measuring cup with a spout to put the sand from the bags into first then I used a funnel to get the sand into the small mouth of the bottle.

I made sure to write down where the sand came from before I poured it into the bottle. Starting from the bottom: (1) Rutherford Beach, Lake Charles, LA (2) Bimini, Bahamas (3) Gulf of Mexico, LA (4) Lake Michigan, Holland, MI (5) Big Sur, CA (6) Clearwater Beach, FL (7) Great Sand Dunes NP, CO 

(8) Miami Beach, FL, (9) Shell Key Preserve, FL (10) Vero Beach, FL (11) Rivera Beach, FL (12) Playa Del Carmen, Mexico

This is the finished project.

I like how it looks with the other sand/shell bottles.

And I love how it looks in my beachy bathroom!

Read this post to find more ideas for using your vacation finds.

Decorating With Vacation Memories

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What do you do with the sand you bring back from your beach vacations? Please share in comments!

Update Old Photo Albums

My kids enjoy looking through our old photo albums.  There's something about flipping through the pages that doesn't compare to sliding from picture to picture on their phones.  It's especially fun for them to share the old photos with their better halves.  Our "new" kids, son-in-law Pete, daughter-in-law Nicole and soon to be daughter-in-law Chrissy didn't know our family and friends until we were all much older and they find some of our pictures to be adorable but most of them to be hysterical!   They'll snap pictures of our pictures to save to their phones or to send to one of our family members or friends who they think will find the picture as hysterical as they do.  Older son, Joe makes sure he points out the mushroom haircut he endured throughout his entire childhood and younger son, Mike will still ask why I needed to dress him and his brother alike when they were far from being twins since they are a good 3 1/2 years apart.  And forget about the "tail" he wore all those years when I wouldn't let the barber cut that one piece of hair in the back of his head!  I must have styled daughter, Lisa to her liking because she never complains or it may be that she doesn't think it's as funny as her brothers to poke fun at my mothering skills, or lack of I should say!

But the the pictures we enjoy more than anything are of the vacations we took.  Every year we went on a camping trip with four to five other families.  We have camped in almost every state along the east coast with our best friends.  The photos jog our memories of the fun we had, the things we learned about each state and who we enjoyed it all with.  Every year we also went to Florida to visit Grandma and Grandpa.  Our photos remind of us of how much we loved spending time with them and how they loved playing cards with us and joining us on our visits to Disney World, Sea World and every other amusement park in Florida.  We have lots of pictures of the wonderful times we spent with our family and friends in Japan and the vacations the five of us took by ourselves to Washington, DC, Ohio and so much more.  If we didn't have our pictures we would never remember what we did where.

So I've always kept our photo albums out and accessible to everyone but they were getting so worn and old and becoming such an eyesore in our living room.

 I really didn't want to buy brand new albums and not only have the expense of replacing them but also the task of transferring every picture from the old to new so I came up with this idea of updating our albums.  If you have old photo albums that need a quick update this was a pretty easy fix.  

What You'll Need:

* Brown paper roll (a brown paper grocery bag also works)

* Clear contact paper

* Card stock

* Number and letter stickers

* Ruler

* Scissors

* Paper Edger Scissors

* Glue Dots

What You'll Do:

Place photo album on the mailing paper and measure leaving 3" from each side of the album and 1 1/2' on the top and bottom then cut.

Measure 1 1/2" from bottom and top and fold.

  

Fold the two sides over and insert the front and back covers.

Taping the corners of your photo album cover will help to keep the cover on your album.

Measure and cut one 11" X 2" piece of card stock and another of contrasting color that measures

 9 1/2" X 1 1/2".

Trim the edge of the smaller piece of card stock with your edger scissor.  Identify your album by using your number and letter stickers.  Attach your two pieces of card stock with the glue dots. 

Cover with clear contact and attach identification strip to covered photo album.

That's it!  Now call over a family member or friend to sit with you on the couch and enjoy looking through your photos together!