Anniversary Gift

This year was our 20th wedding anniversary. Traditionally, it stands for china but we didn't need ornaments or dining sets and a trip to China was likely out of the question so....inspired by Pinterest I made a photo gift.

The general idea was to take pictures of the children in positions forming the numbers of our wedding date - 3.9.14.  We tried several ideas but eventually settled on photos where the children made the numbers with their bodies. The trickiest to film was my son on the trampoline - I had take the photo before he actually jumped in order to catch the number he made.

After I'd put the photos onto the computer I changed them to tasteful black and white. Still not sure though if I prefer them in the original colours, will probably print them out one day to compare.

For your information, my husband found me some china-themed gifts including green tea from China and the 80's film 'Big trouble in Little China'!

Lemon Sugar Scrub

Vanilla scrub in middle, lemon on both sides

Last year, for my daughters teenage friends, we put a hot chocolate recipe in small jars and attached a candy cane 'a la snowman soup'. This year she thought we could try body scrubs. So, today we used a recipe I'd pinned onto my pinterest board and made both vanilla and lemon sugar scrubs. 

          Lemon Sugar Scrub         

          What you will need: 2 1/2 cups of white sugar, 1 cup of olive oil, 4 TBS of Lemon juice, 
          containers

          Vanilla Brown Sugar Scrub


          What you will need: 1 cup white sugar, 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup-3/4 cups olive oil
          1-2 tsp of vanilla (your preference)

Basic ingredients are all combined together in a bowl and then packed into individual jars. They both work really well but we felt the vanilla recipe needed more essence and the lemon recipe turned out very wet. We just add more essence and sugar to try to get a not too dry, not too wet consistency. 

For a few of her friends we've used the body scrub as part of a pamper box.