Father's Day - Gifts from the Heart

This Father’s Day, the kids and I decided that we wanted to create some home-made gifts for the three main men in our lives – Daddy, Poppie and Grandad.  Through school, kindy and daycare they had already been busy making cards and small gifts for the Dads over the last couple of weeks and I thought we could complement these with some more home-made presents.  The internet is a wonderful source of inspiration and we literally found a million ideas to choose from.

We decided that as it’s now Spring and we’re coming into barbecue season, a barbecue bucket would make an ideal gift for Dad and Poppie.  So, we headed off to our local hardware store to gather the items to go into our BBQ buckets.  We found some excellent stainless steel buckets and for Dad we put in BBQ cleaning products, a scraper and scrubber, canola spray oil, and oil catching sand.  For Poppie, who loves seafood, we put in a BBQ grill cage for fish, some wood chips to add some smoky flavour to the fish, and some cleaning products. 

Here’s the final product!

 

For Grandad – who lives on the other side of the country – we made up a relax pack of magazines ….. Science, Astronomy and Gardening ….. and included some tea, coffee, chocolate, health bars and licorice.  We included a beautiful painting of a rainbow created by the 4-year old and packaged them all up in a box.  The box was promptly mailed to ensure it got to Grandad on time.

As an extra gift for Dad, we put together a 6-pack of snacks.  We took 6 empty beer bottles, washed and dried them and used the templates and printed pages from Lil’ Luna’s blog page (http://lilluna.com/fathers-day-super-dad-pop-box-set/) to add decorative touches to the bottles, bottle tops and cardboard carrier.  The result was terrific and super easy for the kids to get involved in and do.  It ended up looking fantastic:

 

Our bottles were filled with M&M’s , cashew nuts, chocolate coated nuts, Maltesers, jelly lollies and a fruit-and-nut mix. 

The Dads were all so pleased with their gifts and the kids and I found it so very satisfying to have put extra time, energy, effort and love into making the gifts rather than just choosing something off the shelf.

For more Father's Day gift ideas - or birthday ideas for the fellas in your life, here are some wonderful ideas at Melissa Goodwin's Frugal and Thriving blog. 

If you’d like to share your home-made Father’s Day gifts, please send me a post or email me at livewelllivesmart@gmail.com .  I’d love to hear about it!