Vanessa is a regular contributor to Impress Your Kids. She is a stay-at-home mom to an energetic three-year-old, Juliet. They spend their days together reading books, attempting crafts, and occasionally beating tree trunks with large sticks. You can read more about their adventures at Silly Eagle Books
With Father’s Day approaching, I have been trying to get “ahead of the game” and have Juliet make a few homemade gifts for her daddy. (My usual trend is to wait until the night before and hastily throw something together!)
She can’t write yet, but she sure can talk. I decided to record some of her thoughts one afternoon in a “Thank You God for Daddy” poem.
I envisioned her sitting down with me and listening as I explained to her that God made a special daddy just for her. She would immediately be grateful and join me in a prayer of thankfulness for daddies…
That is not what happened at all.
Instead, she sat for about 2 seconds before jumping up and running away.
I yelled to her, “Why are you thankful for your daddy?”
“Huh?”
“How can we thank God for daddy?”
“Look! An airplane!”
Okay. Let’s try this a different way: “What do you like about daddy?”
“Oh. I like when he lifts me up!”
So, for the following ten minutes, as she raced around the backyard, I kept asking her what she liked about her daddy. She got more and more into it and gave me some memorable Juliet phrases. I scribbled them down on my piece of paper to be used later.
After she was in bed, I got on the computer and went to Wordle.net to create the card. If you’ve never used this site, it’s really easy. You just type in whatever words and phrases you would like to appear on your page and then it scrambles it and gives you different font combinations.
Since I wanted my card to read a certain way, I had to do a few things.
1. Words that you want to appear the largest need to be typed in multiple times. I typed in Thank You God for My Daddy at least ten times. (The words will only appear once, but the more “Daddy” s you have, the bigger it will be.)
2. Phrases had to be pushed together. I chose to separate the words with periods, but you could use dashes or some other symbol or even just let the words all run together without spaces.
3. After typing in my words and phrases, I hit the “submit” button and it gave me my first option. I didn’t like it because it read “My Daddy Thank You God” . I kept hitting randomize until I came to the option that I liked the best. You can print out as many pages as you like and even save your creation to a public page if you want to share it with the world.
Try it out! It’s really easy and you can play around with it until you get the look you want. It’s a fun (and free!) way to preserve your kids’ thoughts and cute phrases.
You could use it as a card or even frame it to make it look even more fancy–and hopefully, your gratitude/thankfulness discussion will go better than mine did!
(If you are looking for some good children’s books about daddies, I’ve compiled a Father’s Day Booklist that features our favorites!)
Love this idea … I did one for my Mom for Mother’s Day and one for my son’s teacher.
Here’s the teacher idea:
http://www.themotherhood.com/post/show/id/477892
Ah! Daddy’s gonnna love it!
.-= Janna @ The Adventure of Motherhood´s last blog ..Attitude Makes All the Difference =-.
That conversation sounds like one I would be having with Esme! I am definitely wanting to copy this…
.-= Mozi Esmes Mom´s last blog ..Wordless Wednesday =-.
A neat idea for a card! The story about how you got her ‘phrases’ is cute!
.-= Chels´s last blog ..Design, Color, Decorate…. =-.
THANK YOU – THANK YOU!! love IT – AND WILL BE USING YOUR IDEA. THANK YOU!
.-= sarahmamaoftwo´s last blog ..Wordless Wednesdays…Simple pleasures, the Joy of worms! =-.
Adorable – And thanks for the link – so many possibilities there my mind is reeling!