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

Advent Activities

This year our advent calendar is a little different.

Rather than the kids finding a chocolate or other sweet each day in the lead up to Christmas, I have prepared activity vouchers for them. Each voucher is good for a particular Christmas activity such as choosing a Christmas tree, visiting Santa, ice skating in Union Square...

As all of our belongings are yet to arrive from Australia (they're at the dock waiting for delivery) I haven't been able to be quite as creative as I'd like with the presentation of the vouchers. No photoshop and no craft materials have made it a little tricky. A cutting mat, rotary knife, hole punch etc would have all come in very handy. As these sorts of items are all on their way here I was hesitant to spend money on new supplies. This has resulted in the vouchers looking a little shabbier than I would have liked but as the saying goes, it's the thought that counts! I've got all sorts of ideas for Advent Activity Vouchers for next year so stay tuned...

For the base of our advent calendar this year I have gone with this Kikki K advent calendar.

I saw one of these in a Kikki K window display last year and just had to have it. Unfortunately they had sold out Australia wide and were not able to sell their display stock. When I saw this year's version of the calendar in store in early October I just had to snap it up straight away. And it was lucky I did as they were sold out Australia wide by the time I came to America!

The first two pockets of our advent calendar were filled with little cards that Ava had made so I started the vouchers on Day 3 with a visit to America's Children's Holiday Parade - or "The Christmas Pageant" as we called it :)