I'm pretty sure I have mentioned here before that I have the honor of being a class mother for my five year old's class this school year. And while I was initially kind of excited about the whole idea - my mom had always been a class mother - I've come to realize that it involves many many phone calls, mostly to people who don't really want to hear from me because when I call on official class mother business, I am generally asking for money. But I call anyway. And I ask anyway. And I hope that people remember to send in checks with their kids.
But sometimes being the class mommy has perks. Like when I get to take out all my art supplies and make fun things for the teachers. For example, my son's class is having a play this week and it was decided that the end of the year teacher gifts would be presented at the end of the play. The other class mommy and I collected all the money and the other class mommy graciously offered to go pick up the gift cards for the teachers. I offered to get the thank you cards and something to wrap the gift cards in because handing over a gift card in an envelope is, dare I say, tacky.
Except here's where my problem started. It's been so darn hot lately that I have no interest in packing up the girls and the diaper bag and the snack bag and the potty and dragging it all to the car and driving to wherever it is that one would get packaging for a gift card. I would much rather stay in my air conditioned porch and made gift card holders while the girls played and tried to help. And so that's what we did.
I was a little nervous because I couldn't imagine what I was going to fashion a gift card holder out of. And I also knew that we were out of staples* and since I had no intention of going anywhere, I had to make something that did not need to be stapled together.
But sometimes being the class mommy has perks. Like when I get to take out all my art supplies and make fun things for the teachers. For example, my son's class is having a play this week and it was decided that the end of the year teacher gifts would be presented at the end of the play. The other class mommy and I collected all the money and the other class mommy graciously offered to go pick up the gift cards for the teachers. I offered to get the thank you cards and something to wrap the gift cards in because handing over a gift card in an envelope is, dare I say, tacky.
Except here's where my problem started. It's been so darn hot lately that I have no interest in packing up the girls and the diaper bag and the snack bag and the potty and dragging it all to the car and driving to wherever it is that one would get packaging for a gift card. I would much rather stay in my air conditioned porch and made gift card holders while the girls played and tried to help. And so that's what we did.
I was a little nervous because I couldn't imagine what I was going to fashion a gift card holder out of. And I also knew that we were out of staples* and since I had no intention of going anywhere, I had to make something that did not need to be stapled together.
So this is what I did:
I had these very narrow, medium sized paper bags with handles that I had gotten ages ago at Michael's, a 12 pack for $1. I wasn't sure what I would do with them at that point but pretty much anything that is 12 for $1 is going into my shopping cart. The bags themselves were too large to hold a gift card. So I cut the top half off, including the handle part - and the girls have been walking (crawling) around with the tops of the bags as mini pocketbooks ever since. So much fun.
I had these very narrow, medium sized paper bags with handles that I had gotten ages ago at Michael's, a 12 pack for $1. I wasn't sure what I would do with them at that point but pretty much anything that is 12 for $1 is going into my shopping cart. The bags themselves were too large to hold a gift card. So I cut the top half off, including the handle part - and the girls have been walking (crawling) around with the tops of the bags as mini pocketbooks ever since. So much fun.
Now I was left with the bottoms of four paper bags. I cut squares of scrapbook paper that matched both bag colors (pink and purple) and glued a piece of scrapbook paper on the front of each bag. I made sure not to center the paper on the bag because I still needed room towards the top of the bags to punch holes for the ribbon.
Which is what I did next. I punched two holes at the almost top of the bags. Then I put a half of a piece of tissue paper (brown, it tied the whole thing together as there was also brown in the scrapbook paper) into each bag and threaded raffia ribbon through the holes of the bag. I tied one of the bags and then realized that I didn't have the gift cards yet so I left the other three open.
Then I typed out a simple message of super-thanks to the fantastic teachers, printed it, cut each message out and glued it on top of the scrapbook paper, so that there appears to be a border of scrapbook paper around each message.
Then I lined them up on a really high shelf so no one can touch them until it's time to leave for the play. You can't be too careful with sticky fingers everywhere. And that was it. It didn't take too long, they're pretty cute if I may say so myself, and I spent the afternoon in my cool porch instead of a hot parking lot fighting with the double stroller that doesn't seem to want to open properly anymore.
Then I lined them up on a really high shelf so no one can touch them until it's time to leave for the play. You can't be too careful with sticky fingers everywhere. And that was it. It didn't take too long, they're pretty cute if I may say so myself, and I spent the afternoon in my cool porch instead of a hot parking lot fighting with the double stroller that doesn't seem to want to open properly anymore.
*Why did I know we were out of staples? Do I staple often? Do I feel lost without my stapler? All good questions. And I'll tell you, I rarely staple anything except that the other morning my five year old had a book report due.
The teachers had sent out the book report instructions way in advance and I tacked the whole thing up on the bulletin board and then totally forgot about it, until the morning it was due. And so in the mad rush to do the book report and find some way to keep all the pages together, I started looking for the stapler.
And I found it, which was huge. And I stapled. And nothing came out. I opened the stapler up and there was one lone sad little staple in there. I pushed him forward to the edge of the stapler, closed it up and stapled. And out he came, all nicely folded, but not folded through the book report pages. So sad. And it was already 8:10am, we were late and I couldn't even find a paper clip.
Lucky for me though, the book report was kind of cute - the pages were shaped like a sandwich, so two pages were bread slices, one was a tomato, one lettuce and I forget the others. So I put the whole thing into a big Ziploc bag and wrote sandwich bag on it. I was cracking up. No one else was. Everyone else wanted to know why I was taking so long with the book report. Sheesh. Some people have no sense of humor in the morning.
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