Back to School

I'm sure by now, many of you have heard of the terrible airplane crash that befell Nie of the Nie Nie dialogues. I have been following her blog for a while, it is beautiful, and I love her ideas. I was deeply saddened when I learned of the accident. Even though I don't know her personally, I feel a connection. We share the same faith, the same number of children that are similar in ages, and the same love of life. It has been wonderful to see how the blogging community has rallied around her and her family during this difficult time. So when Gabrielle from one of my favorite blogs, Design Mom, designated today as Nie Nie day, I thought I'd join in.

Since I now have two kiddos in school, I was looking for a fun new tradition to send them off in style. I planned this back to school dinner for my kiddos after seeing Nie's post about a similar dinner she had for her girls. I waited to post about it until today so that I could make it a part of Nie Nie day. (Give credit where credit is due, I always say.)

So on to the festivities...

I love pennant banners, so I made this cute one out of scrapbook paper and raffia. It's hard to tell what it says in these photos...even though I took pictures of it from all different angles...but it says "happy first day". I cut the triangles out of 12 x 12 paper (I was able to get 3 out of each piece). Then I printed out the letters and cut them out in circles (boy, it really made me wish that I had one of those giant circle craft punches or a scrapbook circle cutter.) Finally, I punched holes in each flag and tied them with raffia. It turned out really cute!



I don't know about you all, but the beginning of the school year always feels more like a new beginning to me than the real beginning of the year in January. So, borrowing another idea from Nie, the Hubby and I decided to introduce a new family theme. Our theme for this year is "kindness begins with me". And as long as I was stealing, ahem, I mean borrowing ideas, I decided to make a similar table top banner to the one she made. I used a piece of ribbon that coordinated with the pennants, and some sticky letters to spell out the theme.

Finally, I'm all about paper crafts, so when I saw this cute little idea in this month's Family Fun magazine, I was all over it! I used the leftover paper to make these tiny three dimensional stars. They added a really fun look to the table - and they were easy-peasy!

Our menu was not overly fancy, but consisted of some of my kids favorites...parmesan chicken, lemon pudding salad, and a green salad (not their favorite, but necessary to get in those vegies!)

After dinner I presented the kids with new backpacks full of school supplies AND their nifty new clipboards! It was so much fun! And by the end of dinner, the kids were EXCITED to go back to school! This will definitely become a new tradition at our house.

For those of you that saw yesterday's post...did you "spy" the baby food jar votives and the chalkboard? Yes, I really do use them ;-)

And look at this! As I was cleaning up after dinner I put the little stars in this jar...don't they look cute? I think I'm going to leave them like this.

Thanks Nie for all of your wonderful ideas! I wish you and your husband a speedy and successful recovery. I know many of the blogs participating in today's Nie Nie day are offering silent auctions with the proceeds going to the Nielson family recovery fund so I urge you to check them out! Gabrielle at Design Mom also has links you can use to find other ways to help the Nielson family. Thanks for visiting!

Update: It came to my attention that the link to the clipboards I made for the kids wasn't working earlier...I have fixed the problem. ;-)