the squibix family blog

He is, or course, a recreation of Harvey's favorite storybook character, and a nod to Harvey's current obsession with all things snowman. I swear... you could have a snowman the size of a pencil head drawn on wrapping paper and Harvey would plow through a room of excited children and dogs to point to it.

Indeed, when I gave him the ornament this morning Harvey exclaimed "noman!" and shook it excitedly.

Come to think of it, this guy needs a scarf if he wants to match the drawings in the book. Okay, so there's one more thing to do before all the ornaments go into the box.

Before we close the book on Christmas crafting 2010, I wanted to share with you this picture book I made for Harvey. It started off as a fun thing to do while we're coloring together and turned into a billion-hour project with far too many steps going into binding and prepping for binding and gluing and binding.

The book uses the text of The Great Thanksgiving (according to the Book of Common Prayer - I used Eucharistic Prayer C if you want to get technical) to tell the overall story of God and his people.

God created us, we turned against him, yaddah yaddah yaddah, then came Jesus.

I tried to use pictures that Harvey could recognize. This one he can call "huggie."

One day Harvey slept for a whole two-and-a-half hours, letting me complete the last of the pictures and do all the lettering in one amazing afternoon. The hymn singer picture below was one of the two drawings I made during that session, and I'll always remember it as a testament of praise to a toddler in slumber as much as to God.

I consider it one of my better qualities that I often plow into projects without thinking through their completion. This book was a good example. I can now tell you much more about binding your own board book, perhaps enough to put you off the project. I thought I would glue each page to cardboard and then laminate with contac paper. The gluing took about ten billion times as long as I thought it would, since each page needed to be lined up on the cardboard just right. I thought I would use rubber cement but that ended up being slippery, so I went back to using glue-sticks, which as it turned out were out of stock in our office four days before Christmas. One of the low (or high) points of this project was me promising Dan sexual favors if he would run out to Staples at 8:30pm on a Monday evening to buy me more glue. Then Dan used his school's laminator to seal the pages, and I taped down the laminated edges using $15 of invisible tape. Well, I only used about 50 cents in the end, but I had to buy $15 because the packages were sealed in the store and I couldn't tell which kind I needed.

And so, on the verge of switching to all cloth bags for all future Christmases, we nowown about ten years worth of scotch tape.

No matter. That's what Christmas is all about.