Who Has Time for Mother's Day?
I know what you're thinking. Why do all of the photos look like this is a Father's Day craft? I'm just going to guess that your house is like mine and the only craft you get for Mother's Day is one the kids did at school with their thoughtful, creative teachers. My husband gets super fun handmade gifts for Father's Day because I'm in charge of doing it and I get all Pinterest happy when a craft holiday gets close. So when people started asking me to post a Mother's Day project for the kiddies I got a little stumped. Then I felt stupid. It's literally the motherlode of crafting holidays and I had nothing. Then I felt stupid for feeling stupid because I've never done any Mother's Day craft. It's my day. I'm not supposed to be planning it and preparing projects for it. Let's also assume that your husbands aren't big crafters either and just buy orchids from the grocery store and make you breakfast in bed. I love my orchid/bacon holiday, however, you might be wanting a project and now that I'm off the hook I still decided to post a fun project that could easily be done for Mother's Day. I did it for Father's Day last year (hence all the "dad" photos) but I realized it could work for either day.
I struggle with time management. Pretty much every area of my life has special time management challenges. I rarely plan meals so all of the courses are done at the right time, I forget to buy gifts in advance, I race to plan the kid's birthday parties at the last minute. They end up being fabulous so I've never had much incentive to change my ways. I only mention it because this craft takes some forethought and planning. It's worth it because of how incredibly easy it is.
My husband was out of the house for a few hours and the kids were just hanging out and all happened to be home at the same time. This last part is key to keeping the project as low maintenance as possible. I cut out some large letters to spell out "Dad," grabbed the kids and headed to the back yard. You could go to a park or someplace fun. I was being exceptionally lazy and just used my back yard. Luckily, the kids were in a good mood and cooperated; and by "cooperated" I mean I managed to get a full 30 minutes of them not beating the crap out of each other. Obviously, you can substitute letters to spell out "Mom" to make this Mother's Day friendly.
The key to photographing children is planting some ideas and letting them think they made up the rest. I just handed them the letters and let them come up with fun ways to use them. Their outfits weren't color coordinated which would have made this photo shoot nicer but I wasn't going to push my luck. Black and White is my best friend when I can't get colors to cooperate. Take a whole bunch of photos. Try to get the kids in as many different set ups as possible. Let them be creative. The more photos you have, the easier it will be for you to put together your project.
Shoot fast because once the kids start bickering you're done. That first insult thrown "breaks the seal" and there's no getting the magic back. It's a quick decent into hair pulling and name calling. Wrap it up quickly and head to your computer to start uploading the photos to see if you have some usable ones. I thought I had taken a lot more but realized I only had about twenty. I was kicking myself that I didn't take more or that my kids didn't look like they stepped out of an Anne Geddes photo shoot. Then I realized that I didn't care and the photos I took would work for my gift and my husband
would love it anyway. Also, he has no idea who Anne Geddes is.
Once you're happy you have enough usable photos, it's time to go to your favorite photo project website and have fun. You can use their suggestions of gifts or do what I do and make a photo book. I'm addicted to photo books. They kill two birds with one stone. It's a gift but it's also helping me organize and store my photos. There are tons of websites out there to use but I usually go to either Shutterfly or Snapfish. They have lots of photobook options and layouts and have recently added embellishments to make your book look more like a scrapbook. It's a lazy woman's version of scrapbooking but I'm pretty sure we've already established that I embrace and accept my lazy.
Usually when I make a photobook I try to squeeze in as many photos as possible to kill both of those aforementioned birds. I embrace my frugal side along with my lazy side and only order from the photo sites when they're having sales. Luckily for us and this post, Mother's and Father's Day are big photo gift giving holidays and their stuff is always on sale (40-50% off if you time it right). For the purposes of this gift, and since I only had about twenty photos to work with, I made a fun book that had lots of sayings and embellishments along with the photos. I used larger versions of the photos to fill the space and wrote lots of nice things about Dad (or Mom depending on your holiday of choice). I even came up with a short questionnaire for each of the kids to fill out. I transcribed their answers into the book because I needed some space fillers. I originally felt like a screw up for not having more photos to fill the book with, but it worked out even better because it forced me to be creative and fill the space with drawings and sentiments from the kids. My husband loved it, the kids loved it and I was a rock star for whipping up a personal gift that didn't take lots of time and shopping to find.
Don't think I haven't noticed that I'm posting this too late for you to use for Mother's Day this year. Remember how I mentioned earlier that my timing is always off? And this post wasn't posted in time for you to read it and order a book to be shipped to you in time for Mother's Day? This is exactly the reason I don't receive gifts like this for Mother's Day but always have everything timed out perfectly for Father's Day. Now you're reading this amazing post and will want to do this project; and now you have plenty of time to pull it together to be a rock star in your house...on Father's Day. Welcome to my world.
