Father's Day Card 2014 (Australian Edition)

It's Father's Day... again!

As I've mentioned before, lucky Kim gets to celebrate Father's Day twice a year. First up in June for American Father's Day, and secondly in September for Australian Father's Day. Unfortunately Australia and America share the same date for Mother's Day so I only get one special day. Boo.

This year I've been so busy with visitors, vacations and back to school that Australian Father's Day sneaked up on me. With no barrage of ads for power tools, barbecues, electronic gizmos and socks on tv it completely slipped my mind until a few days ago. Sorry Grandpas in Australia, your cards will be a little late. Nothing unusual there though!

If you've seen the previous Father's Day cards that I've made with the girls you'll know that I'm fond of coming up with something cheesy. There was the giant redwood themed "Tree-mendous Father's Day" card from last year, and the baseball themed "Number 1 Fan" cards from the year before. This year is no different with another cheesy caption. I can't help myself. I think I have a problem!

Lately Kim has been a little obsessed with wearing hats. And the girls are obsessed with wearing Daddy's hats when they can get their hands on one. With this new obsession and a cheesy catch line in mind the girls and I set about creating a card involving Daddy's hat collection.

Happy (Australian) Father's Day 2013

Yesterday was Father's Day number two for the year, otherwise known as Australian Father's Day. Lucky Kim gets to celebrate Father's Day twice each year (American Father's Day was back in June), while I get just one Mother's Day.

We had organised to spend the day at Lego KidsFest in San Jose so I figured that a Lego themed card would be just the thing for this Father's Day. I played around with a few different ideas (trying to write out different messages in Lego) but kept coming back to the simplicity of a Lego heart. Much easier to make than a Lego message and it ties in nicely with this year's Mother's Day cards, which you can see here.

Here's a look at our Lego inspired cards plus a few shots from our photo shoot. I really wanted to take photos up on our roof but as always the wind came out as soon as the camera did so Ava has some interesting looking hair! 

Don't "Lego" my heart!

Father's Day 2012: Australian Edition

Time for Father's Day number two for the year!

Lucky Kim gets to celebrate Father's Day twice a year. American Father's Day was back in June and now we have just had Australian Father's Day this weekend. Can you believe it's September already?

Seeing as Kim has already been spoiled once this year with Father's Day treats we decided to keep it a little more low key this time around. No presents this time but we did come up with a cute card.

You may recall that we attended our first baseball game a few weeks back. You may also recall that the girls were super excited to wear "baseball fingers". I thought that these two things would work nicely together for our Father's Day card. I'm always partial to a little cheesiness!

I took one of the photos from the game of the girls wearing their Oakland A's "baseball fingers", edited out the logo and text, added in my own details, added a cheesy greeting and voila, perfect Father's Day cards. I personalised them with the names Daddy, Papa (for my Dad) and Doug (for Kim's Dad - yes, the girls call him by his real name!).

Papa's #1 fans

Father's Day USA

Oops... once again I've written out a blog post and then forgotten to go back, add in the last few details and click the publish button!

It's not really Father's Day here anymore, but it was when I started typing this post...

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It's Father's Day here in America.

Lucky Kim gets to celebrate Father's Day twice a year; in June for American Father's Day and again in September for Australian Father's Day. No fair! I only get one Mother's Day.

The upside (for me) to having two Father's Days a year is that I get an extra chance to work on gift and card ideas.

This year for Father's Day (USA edition) Ava and I decided to give Kim the gift of family bike rides. Ava drew some lovely pictures of Kim and the girls riding their bikes and I turned them into a gift pack.

Ava liked the idea of giving Kim a booklet of vouchers. I liked the idea of making him a card that entitled him to unlimited family bike rides. Something he could keep in his wallet and pull out every time he wanted to take the girls for a ride. We decided to combine the ideas and make both. Well, sort of.

We came up with the idea of the Mason Family Bike Club. Ava and I made ID cards for each member of our family and these were included in a Member Gift Pack with a dozen vouchers, each one good for one family bike ride.

The "Mason Family Bike Club"  member gift pack with Ava' original drawings

Father's Day Card 2009

One last Father's Day memory before we get onto this year...

This time it's the Father's Day card for 2009.

Kim really enjoys reading and at one point seemed to be reading lots of Penguin Classics. I decided to take the classic and instantly recognisable Penguin design and make it into a card.

The artwork front and back

The finished card

To go with Daddy's Penguin Classic themed card Ava also gave him a Penguin Classic note book. While not quite up there with the quality of Moleskine notebooks, these Penguin Classic notebooks by UK company Wild & Wolf are cute and make a nice gift idea for book lovers.

Penguin Classics notebook

Well, tomorrow is Father's Day and I'd love to share what I've created for this year but as Kim is on the other side of the world and I still haven't posted it to him I'd like to wait and not spoil the surprise for him.