A Gift for Daddy--Painted Hammer

I have no idea what is happening with blogger.  It went down sometime Thursday afternoon, and I wasn't able to access it until yesterday afternoon.  Some blogs are missing completely.  I usually have some scheduled to post up to a week in advance.  I had moved some around the other night and now they are back to their original dates.  If and when they get this fixed, this blog could end up with all sorts of crazy (possibly empty) posts.  Hopefully they'll get it together soon!

Anyway, G's birthday was this week, so Little Man and I set out to make him a present.  When I started working with Little Man almost 3 years ago, I sort of set myself up for this.  We made crafts for everything and everybody--grandparent's day, mommy's birthday, daddy's birthday, nana's birthday, papa's birthday, mother's day, father's day, Christmas...  So now I feel obligated to do something sort of handmade every time one of these events rolls around.

To me, it's harder to do for a dad than a mom.  Maybe it's just how I perceive G.  I know K is going to love anything--scribbles included.  I try to make the gifts for G something that he would appreciate.  Since you can't really google daddy birthday crafts, I just looked up Father's Day gift ideas.  I came across our idea here.

I picked Little Man up from school and we headed of to Lowe's to buy a hammer.  It was $5.  I've read that you can get them at a dollar store, but I wasn't trying to go that cheap. :)  Little Man was so excited.

I skipped the part in the directions where it said to sand it.  I figured it would work out alright.  So while Little Man ate his lunch, I primed with with (sorta) white paint to help speed up the process.

The directions also said you had to do one side at a time.  Wrong.  Who has time for that?  I just stood it on it's end and it dried just fine.

I showed LM the example of what we were doing, thinking a visual would help.  I'm not sure if it did or not, but it was his project and he was proud.

We had to let the paint dry while he napped.

Then we added a few more layers and used a paint pen.

I found this saying online and we made a card

I got an email saying Thank You and that G loved it.  Little Man has already informed me that mommy's birthday is in two weeks and we need to make sure we have something for her! :)  He loves this kind of stuff.