My friends are REALLY great at gift giving. I believe I have mentioned this before. Well, I can’t say I always hit it out of the park with my gift choices, but being on the receiving end of thoughtful gifts has made me more mindful of trying to be really personal in what I give, when I can.

Well, if you are a blog reader of a certain friend of mine, Bobbi, and you read this blog post about her rainbow cake, well then you would know I had some birthday shopping to do.

Bobbi has been a good friend of mine for years now (it’s so weird that I can say YEARS, time goes by SO FAST!) and she has been extraordinarily giving of her time, talents, friendship, support and yes, she has had her fair share of thoughtful gifts. I feel very blessed to have her friendship in my life and I wanted to find a way to show her that. I was pretty stumped at first though. After some thinking, I remembered that her favorite movie is Up. I’m hoping she’ll get all personal someday on her own blog about why she loved it so much, but I’ll just say, she REALLY digs that movie.

So I tried to see if I could find something to give her from that movie.

There’s nothing out there.

Until, I found this this little corner of Disney’s website where you can print out patterns of Disney character’s and make them into 3D figurines, statues, or whatever you would call them. They looked pretty daunting to make, and with Bobbi, the queen of doing things VERY WELL, I knew they had to turn out great. So I took a deep breath and accepted the challenge.

John wanted to help too, since he loves Bobbi as well, so this started out as a joint effort. First we printed the images on a color lazer printer. Once it came time to cut them out, I had all intentions of being a part of the construction, but John, knowing my haphazard and imperfect cutting history, he allowed no such participation. I merely cheered him on from the sidelines.

I wanted to share images of the finished project because I figured that most people didn’t know that Disney had all these cool things to make online.

So the following Up characters were created, with love, by John, for Bobbi:

You can even remove his walker!!! I hear the tennis balls were redonk to cut out. John, you did an awesome job!

I couldn’t believe the precision of John’s cutting on the shoes.

The one thing I DID get to do was hot glue the flag on the backpack. I was a nervous wreck, trust me.

I had to photograph the house super fast before John went out the door one morning. Note: if you make the house, reinforce the balloons with a popsicle stick so that it can stand on it’s own. If you don’t hang it with thread and hold it that way, the whole thing flops over. The house has a bottom on it though, so it’s intended to hang.

John was so proud and he was a bit sad to see them go, but excited for me to gift them. John, thank you for being my own little “etsy artist” on demand. Oh and yes, Bobbi loved them. 🙂

So the next project will be for Miles. (Trust me, Miles FLIPPED when he saw the Up characters. John was so proud to show them off to Miles. It was adorable.) He’s going to make a Woody Marionette.

and a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Playset.

Go nuts John! Lord knows, I do not have the fine motor skills or patience these days to pull ANY of these projects off!

So I don’t know if this really counts as thoughtful gift giving considering I just had an idea and then my husband carried it out. Actually, these days, that’s totally my life story. If I want a picture hung….”JOHN!? Can you please hang this for me?” If I want something really heavy moved or something with toxic fumes painted on the wall? “JOHN!? Can you do this for me?” and trust me, the list goes on. I’m like a big bloated queen with a long list of to do’s and a pointed finger. Bless his soul.

Ok, I’m shushing. I have to run because I have a to do list of things that I actually can do (like cleaning bathrooms…) that I need to do while Miles is resting.