…and I realized that Personally Junior had done nothing crafty to add to his teachers’ Christmas gifts. What??!! How could that have happened? Well, the truth is that with only one child left in elementary school a lot of that type of thing becomes a last-minute thought, or even an afterthought. Sorry PJ, you see how it is. But really, there are also a lot of perks to not having your mothers’ undivided attention, right?
When the Personally Teens were little…and had their mothers’ undivided attention…there was an excess of craftiness for every occasion and hardly enough takers for all of it. I remember one hot July day, not even an occasion, when the two of them spent a whole morning twisting pipe cleaners together into candy canes. Then one of them who shall remain nameless took it upon himself to set up shop on the front lawn to sell them to the neighbours for 50 cents each. I’m sure there’s an adorable photo somewhere which I totally don’t have time to dig up now. I leave it to you to conjure up an image. Blonde blue-eyed five-year-old selling pipe cleaner candy canes from his front lawn. In July. The neighbour’s grandma gave him two dollars for one and he had a few other takers too.
But I digress. So teacher’s gifts are ready to go, it’s 7pm, I’m proofreading a paper on musical applications of the Fibonacci sequence and ordering grad photos. What?! I have a high-school student graduating? Don’t even go there right now. But no time to even search Pinterest and recreate something amazing. Only time to work with what you’ve got. So I scrounge through our crafty stuff and come up with this. Some sets of chip-board Christmas shapes (I’m sure I had great intentions whenever I bought those), four green washi tapes, some ornament stickers and yellow curling ribbon.
I set PJ to decorating one side of the Christmas tree shaped chip boards, and to write his Merry Christmases on the back. No glitter, glue or paint in sight. Or pipe cleaners either, although they might have come in handy. And yet we were all reasonably happy and done before bed-time. Success. Nothing epic or fascinating, just a snippet of our life and trying to make it work from day to day.
But what is it with the last-minute creativity that always seems so urgent at the eleventh hour. I have this need to add a personal hand-made touch to everything. Maybe life is easier without that obsession. I don’t think I’ll ever know.
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