Jun 22 2007
father’s day
I waited to relate this until I had the pictures taken and off the camera and uploaded. Yay!
We had a lovely father’s day. The kids got up and snuck downstairs while James and I slept in a bit. I must say, this is the nicest part about them getting a bit older. When they started making a bit of a racket, I got up and went downstairs with them so daddy could sleep in.
We got out the present we had gotten for James and got to work. I mixed up some concret, poured it in the mold, and then the kids got busy sticking glass bead-like things in it, making hand impressions, and trying very hard to distract me so that they could do letter stamps all over the place willy nilly. I, however, used my mom-powers to not get distracted and kept all the words as actual words.
The resulting garden stepping stone turned out quite nicely.
I am pretty unoriginal, as this is the same thing we did for Father’s Day 2 years ago. I’m glad I got a fancier kit this time, because in the other one, we had to just scratch the letters into the concret with a toothpick and it really didn’t look that great. We had to embellish everything with paint.
I don’t mind that it’s unoriginal and now we have 2 because look at those handprints! We’ll want those later! Too cute!
So we made the stepping stone and set it in a safe place to set for 2 days. After we let James sleep in, we brought him breakfast in bed (poptarts and coke) and all the homemade cards and pictures the kids had made in school.
The sweetest part of the day was after I shooed the kids from basically jumping on Daddy, he turned to me, his eyes moist and said, “I’m so happy we have them. I love being a daddy. They make me so happy.”
We spent the rest of the day poking around at the Potomac mall (legos for ethan, new shoes for jocelyn) and then came home to launch teeeny tiny rockets at a nearby soccer field.
Everyone had a great day.
Thanks for being such a great daddy, James. I love you.
-amy
3 Responses to “father’s day”
That’s fantastic. I love that idea!!
For some reason when you said you were an expert concrete mixer, I had imagined you repairing a sidewalk or re-inforcing a fence post or something. I guess I use the word concrete to refer to construction projects and cement for smaller projects, such as stepping stones. I do like the stepping stone though, the letter stamps make it look so much neater, and the glass bobbles look kinda like gummy worms. I like to use cheap cake pans for a mold and those flat-marble-vase-fillers to decorate, I’ve used fish tank gravel to decorate also. $4 worth of “cement” will make several stepping stones ($4 worth of “concrete” will, on the other hand, re-inforce 1 fencepost). If you find yourself making another father’s day stepping stone a couple years from now, you could do foot prints instead of hand prints… you could do foot prints one year and hand prints the next. It could be a family tradition.
In an odd coincidence, Greg’s mom made stepping stones with footprints from each of her grandchildren, since they were all in the same place. It really is a great idea.