This week I decided to investigate a holiday themed activity from the past. Homemade gifts! But more specifically, Mother’s Day. I personally have fallen in love with the DIY movement so I was excited about this one. As a kid gift giving was mostly made of homemade gifts. We were poor AF because we were kids so everything had a creative twist. Our teachers would even have a project set aside every year for Mother’s Day. It was a big deal. But when doing this project, I realized how self-centered we all were thinking that this “stuff” we made would be enough to show our love for our moms, but if we get real about it, we definitely did it for praise and to stroke our own egos. You gave it to your mom with a huge smile just waiting for her to say how much she loved it and how talented you were. It might have been true but that shit is messed up in it’s own way. But this blog isn’t a therapy session so let’s pat ourselves on the back here and talk about how great we are through these gifts.

I started to research some ideas for gifts via the interwebs and mostly everything that came up have a very common theme. Hands. Most, if not all the gifts I found for kids, were projects involving tracing your hand, painting your hand, making things out of your hands, etc. Hands are the big seller here. I can confirm this hasn’t changed since this 90’s when I was in elementary. I still have a hand print project hanging in my childhood home with some very emotional poem about handprints or fingerprints and it connects to my mom some how. You all know what I am talking about, we all had them. Actually here a picture of mine…

Oh the feelssssss!

Anyway, so I decided to go with the majority and try out the hand flower bouquet. It looked adorable and seemed easy enough. All you need is straws, construction paper, and hands. I have all 3. Off to a good start. I decided to make 3 flowers because my hands have grown since I was kid and I didn’t want them to seem overwhelming. I made a blue, pink and yellow one. I traced and cut out four hands for each color. I then glued them in a circle and connected them to green straws for them the steams. Then I placed them into a homemade vase (a soda pop bottle with twine tied around it) to really complete the look.

Turns out, my hands are way too big for this to look cute! They look ridiculous and almost scary. I don’t know about you guys but hand cut outs kind of freak me out… I didn’t know I have that weird fear until this project. They just look very real even though I know they aren’t. Like these hands could come alive at anytime. Yea hearing it now makes me think I should keep some stuff to myself. ANYWAYYYYY, I made these flowers and my hands are just too big. That’s the bottom line. I guess that’s why when we get older, we buy gifts for our parents on their respective days. We really should. This isn’t cute. Though I totally see the appeal for kids to do this. If someone gave me this and it was from a kid, it might bring a tear to my eye. If an adult gave it to me, it might bring a tear to my eye too but for MUCH different reasons.

This took me about 30 mins to make. I feel like i put in a lot of effort here too but they look super lame. Okay maybe not a lot of effort but enough to get the job done. I live about 2017 miles away from my mom and luckily she doesn’t have to see these monsters in person. I did send them to her in a text to say happy early Mother’s Day to see what she thought about my gift. Its been an hour and I haven’t heard back. Either the overwhelming beauty of my art ability has her in a state of shock or she is sticking to the classic mom saying “when you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all” logic.

So does it still hold up? What do you think??? No it doesn’t. I do think these homemade art projects are adorable for kids to give their parents. They mean something. They obviously save them! You see the small hand and it brings you back to a time when your kid was sweet and you forget how small they really were. My hands have been this same size since I was 11. I was a super tall kid in elementary school… Yup, 5’4″ since 5th grade. They thought I was going to be a basketball star at the rate I was growing… Broken dreams. I blame it on that one sip of coffee I took when I was ten. But again, this is a therapy session, so back to the topic. This, on the other hand (pun) isn’t for an adult. Spend some money on your mom. Say thank you for all the times you brought her school projects for her as gifts, just so you could hear her tell you how awesome you are. Were over that aren’t we?

In case, you still need to hear it, you’re incredibly talented and bring this world more beauty every day you breath on this earth. Now, go buy your mother something nice, you cheapskates!