A Birthday Card for Finn

It’s Monday again! We spent Saturday celebrating my youngest grandson’s fourth birthday. Today is Finn’s actual birthday but the party was on Saturday. It was funny before the party he says to his mom, “Is it really okay to say I’m 4 now?” She assured him it was close enough to his birthday he could say he’s 4. So sweet. Now this little guy is sharp as a tack and knows what he wants – definitely not a follower. I had made his father a birthday card with a motorcycle on it and a couple of weeks ago he spotted and told his mom he wanted to stamp some more motorcycles. She explained to him that Grandma made that card and that Grandma had the stamp and she didn’t have a motorcycle stamp for him to use.  That night he says to his mom, “I need to Skype Grandma.” She says, “We just Skyped Grandma last night.” He says, “I know but I want Grandma to stamp a motorcycle on my birthday card so I NEED to Skype her.” Hoo boy. This is the first time I’ve been asked to stamp a certain image on a birthday card. When I put his name on the card I did a printed F but backwards as if I was writing it. As soon as I did it, I thought to myself, “Finn’s going to pick up on that right away”. He knew the entire alphabet before he was 2 and sure enough he looks at the envelope, turns to his Mom, points to the F and says, “That F is wrong. It’s backwards!”  I was not the least bit surprised! Here’s his card.

 

Now a motorcycle is not what I would normally put on a card for a four year old so I tried to make it a little more juvenile looking by embossing the top of the card with the Stampin’ Up cloud embossing folder, and inked it with Tumbled Glass Distress Ink. Along the seam where the sky and green part I added some washi tape flags and I found a sentiment that was a bit funky looking. The motorcycle stamp is from Paper Wishes – aka Hot Off the Press and it was one of their small $1.29 stamps. He liked it so that’s what counts. This Grandma aims to please.

We stayed overnight and came back Sunday and decided to go to Rondeau Provincial Park instead of straight home to see if we could get some birding in. Not a great decision. It started to rain as we got close to the park and it rained off and on all afternoon. We could only do short trails so we could quickly get to the car if it started raining too hard. The only bird we saw that was exciting to us was the Pileated Woodpecker. This is the largest woodpecker around here – about 12” high – and for some reason we seldom see it. This is the woodpecker that the cartoon character, Woody Woodpecker, was based on. Just after we saw the Pileated Woodpecker the wind picked up so hard I said to Joe, “We have to get out of here, NOW!” It sounded like a small tornado was coming. No, it wasn’t a tornado but we had a strong wind that brought ice pellets down on us. Yes, ice pellets people. In May, ice pellets! Incredible! We made it to the car and drove up to the visitor centre and it hadn’t even rained up there. The staff laughed like crazy when we told them we were hit with ice pellets but they believed us because they had hail the day before. We called it a day and came home. So far the birding season is a failure. Hopefully it will improve this week.

That’s all for a Monday.

Cheers

Violet