Gift Ideas Week 1

I have 5 nieces and 4 nephews (and one godson) and they are my favorite people on the entire planet. Their ages range from 18 to 1 year old. Every year my goal is to give them the best birthday and Christmas presents I can come up with. I spend months researching and dreaming up the best gift ideas. It is a contest I have with myself – can I top last year’s PERFECT gift. Trust me – this is beyond stressful but since my main goal in life is to be there favorite Auntie it is soooooo worth it.

Last Christmas I hit upon the perfect idea. I found a website that can turn photos into black and white line drawings that are pretty amazing coloring pages. This gave me the perfect idea. I would make personalized activity books for each of the little kids. Now I have to admit I didn’t realize how time consuming this project would be so if you are doing this for more than one child at a time you better allow a few weeks to make it happen.

First things first I picked 5 photos of each of the kids that I had taken over the years. I then logged into  http://scrapcoloring.com/convert-images-to-coloring-pages and converted each photo to a coloring page.  Here is a sample of one of the pages.

Next stop was http://www.crayola.com/free-coloring-pages where I downloaded activity pages – connect the numbers and games. I also decided to rewrite some of our favorite fairy tales to be about the kids. Their favorite was my version of the Three Little Pigs which became The Three Little Cousins. Once I had created all of the elements I was ready to assemble the books which only required a trip to Kinko’s where they printed and assembled the pages and covers I had created. Then before wrapping them I wrote a special note to each child on the inside cover of their book.

When they opened their present they had a special, personal activity book that they could spend hours enjoying and then keep as a memory of that time of their life if they wanted.