Grandparent Christmas Gift

We always like doing more of a “home-made” gift for the Grandparents for Christmas.  This year, I took the parent-gift idea from my friend Janae (she and I taught first grade together in Idaho and she is pretty-much amazing) and turned it into a grandparent-gift from both of my kids.  You can check out Janae’s blog post and freebie downloads here: The Sharpened Pencil

So our gift this year was a handprint calendar. I think it’s a super fun way to keep a part of the kids with us all year long. ; ) In fact, I loved it so much I had the kids make one for me too!

Cover page:

January snowmen:

February Hearts:

March Shamrocks:

April Easter Bunnies:

May Caterpillars:

June Butterflies:

July Flags:

August fish:

September trees:

October spiders:

November turkeys (I should NOT have used red paper for the turkeys—makes it hard to see the turkey feathers!):

December Christmas trees:

            

Love them!

Here are some tips if you plan on making your own handprint calendars:

1. Be prepared on them taking a LONG time to complete. What with prep working, painting hands, washing hands, embellishing the pages, putting the calendars together—it took a LOT of hours!

2. If you are making the calendars with young children, have another adult around to help you.  Otherwise, you will have one child standing rubbing paint over your kitchen chairs while the other child is getting their hand painted! You need another adult around to help protect your house/kids’ clothing from paint while you are focusing on actually making the calendars!

3. Once again if you have young children—go with your kids into the bathroom to wash their hands in between each page! I went with my kids each time, and we STILL had paint all over the bathroom counters and sink and towels!

4. Don’t try to make all of the pages in one sitting.  Your kids will get VERY tired of making handprints if you attempt it! Then they will drop to the floor and start crying… with paint all over their hands…

5. Make sure you have a place to dry your wet paintings.  We had our entire kitchen COVERED in wet pages, making dinner prep VERY hard!

Ha ha, seriously, despite my complaining, I’m glad we made these.  They are adorable! Head over to Janae’s blog for more how-tos—I think these make great gifts (and hopefully the Grandparents do too)! : )