Mother's Day Goodies for Grandma

Now that my sweet Mother in law has her Mother's Day Gift in hand I wanted to share what Simone & I did for her this year. 

Grandma & Simone

She is such a special Mom, with a caring heart who is constantly doing for others.  She teaches first grade and works tirelessly teaching her kids with love and care.  Her hours are long and the thanks are far too short (by my measure anyways...).  She deserves more than we can afford to give her, that's for sure!

I swear having a baby makes it so much more fun on holidays like this!  I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and was off and running to Michael's.  

I got some Martha Stewart fabric multi-purpose paint and some fabric pens to do the hand prints, foot prints, and the writing.  We picked up a set of hand towels and a little makeup bag to decorate.  Simone was such a sport.  She handled the paint pretty well, although she really just wanted to squeeze her hand tight when the paint was on it.  Hence why one of her hand prints looks like a tiny bear cubs claw!  I figured that kind of thing adds personality to the gift, right!?

I decided to do the little captions "Helping Hands & Little Feet".  Now, 90% of my crafty ideas come from Pintrest, but that was an "Amy Original" as we say in my house.  I debated on writing the year, but figured it was an important piece of information to add.  For inside the makeup bag I decided to include a small pedicure kit.  I got this great idea from the Pin-Pal exchange I did when I received the beauty in a jar gift.  Since we are far away and can't take Mom for a pedi, we mailed her one! :)

I wrapped it all up with this really cute string that I grabbed in the dollar section of Target (score!) and stamped out some Fleur-De-Lis (a little nod to our family symbol and Simone's very French name...Oui Oui!) confetti with purple paper. 

And, the response from Grandma?  She loved it!  She has plans to hang up the towels in her guest bathroom and good timing on the pedi kit... her nail lady is out of town for a few weeks! 

I think we enjoyed putting it together as much as she liked receiving it!

Happy Mother's Day to a wonderful lady!

Pin Pal Gift Exchange

Elizabeth over at Get Busy Living did a "Pin Pal Gift Exchange" for the month of April.  I got paired up with a rocking super-mom named Kelly.  She lives in New Jersey and is a new mom, a full time working mom, and just got into her Ph.D. program.  Whew!  Made me tired just typing that!  She is an expert at cloth diapering and is living a vegan lifestyle.  You can catch up with her on her blog Hoppy Bottoms.

Kelly made me a really adorable beauty jar gift!  I love it!  She included my favorite nail polish (Essie), a top coat, and supplies to do a mani.  She also included my favorite mascara, tweezers, a Starbucks gift card, a letter A, all wrapped in a mason jar (my fave!).  She did a super job at personalizing a gift for me.  It was exciting when the mail lady brought it up to the door, too.  Getting mail is so fun when you don't know what's inside the box!

After boxing up her gift and getting it to the post office just in time to meet the dead line, I sadly forgot to take a pic of my gift to her.  

I had a blast doing this months Pin Pal exchange.  I'm debating on next months only because May is an insane month for our family, but I still might try to participate.  Check out Elizabeth's blog for the details if you would like to join in!