Teacher Gifts

Two weeks of the summer vacation are now behind us and I'm just catching my breath. What a whirlwind these days have been, with kids (not all of whom are mine) going in and out of the house, and playdates and birthday party planning, and the general breakdown of routine. In all this mayhem, I almost drove the kids to the wrong swimming class, almost missed one little girl's birthday party altogether, and was more than an hour late for our dental appointments because I misread the calendar. 

Also, I'm missing my solo mornings. Sniff.

It is wonderful to have the kids home with me, so I'm resiliently riding these few weeks of madness until we settle into our new normal. If past years are any indication, we usually find our groove by early July or so, and by the time September rolls around, everyone's so used to being in each other's faces and spaces that we can't imagine being apart again. Transition - one of life's guarantees, along with death and taxes - can be a good thing, I tell myself. 

So, I'm backlogged with blogging. Do I care that I am behind? No, I do not. I do, however, have stuff to share, especially now that we've finished with Kate's Tsum Tsum birthday party, and my Port-&-Sort Pattern is out of my hands for a week or so while my testers take it through its paces. 

Like Teacher Gifts 2016. 

This year, the kids made fake cacti.

We got our inspiration here. We used cardstock, wire, polymer clay, corrugated cardboard and that green plant foam to wedge everything into little terracotta pots, which the kids painted.

Emily freezer-paper-stenciled her homeroom teacher a baseball cap. The #squirrel is an inside joke. He wore it all day, she gleefully reported when she came home.

For their homeroom teachers, Jenna and Kate picked out marker pouches from the batch I made a couple of months back.

Instead of markers, they filled them with brand-new Papermate Flair pens in a rainbow of colors, which their teachers "use a lot of".

Finally, we baked cookies for all their other teachers, like we do every year.

Here are the kids waiting with their neighbors for the last morning pick-up for the 2015/16 school year. 

We also gave their bus driver cookies!