Like Father

This crazy bunch of kids loves a good excuse to party.

The long delay between Mother's day and Father's day had them climbing the walls.

When the big day came, there were decorations, presents, and games. 

I recognized another bit of my dad in myself when I stumbled across a blog that had stretched out a "pillow box" pattern to make it look sort of like a bow-tie.  I thought that it should be possible to make a crafty cardstock container that would be a lot more bow-tie-like.  So I started fiddling with designs and finally came up with this:

 It's two tapered pillow-boxes joined together with two additional pieces of cardstock.  It doesn't need glue or tape; the pieces have tabs and lock together like a puzzle.  I was proud of the design; so I took it to cubscouts to have them make one for their fathers.  The two pouches can be filled with candy.  If you fill them with different kinds of candy, you can ask, "Which candy is better?  It's a tie!". 

I ended up not having any cubscouts come that night, but the primary president was there.  I showed her the design and she thought it would be good to use for primary on Sunday.  So I printed off a stack of templates and asked Amanda to try making one to see how long it took.  It took a while.  We decided it wasn't practical to have the kids make their own.  Saturday night, then, we started cutting, scoring, and folding while we watched Sherlock Holmes together.  Putting one bow-tie together probably takes around twenty minutes from start to finish.  That's not too unreasonable.  But it means that making 30 of them takes around 10 hours.

Amanda and I ended up folding ties until the wee hours, long after our episode of Sherlock had ended.  It was kind of fun though.  I kept on thinking of all the odd crafting projects that my father explored, like the time he put notches in a whole bunch of CDs and then pieced them together into a big, nerdy, "disco" ball.  He especially enjoyed origami and paper-crafting. 

I miss my dad a lot.  He gave me seasonal allergies and may have contributed to my lack of social skills.  But he also gave me creativity and curiosity.  He taught me to think things through.  He stayed up late with me when things were tough and there was work to be done.  He taught me to serve others.  He taught me to love the stars.  He taught me that death isn't the end and that we'll be together again some day.  I'm looking forward to that.