Wreath-a-palooza!

A few weeks ago, Wyatt and I were invited to a wreath-making extravaganza by our friends Whitney and Heather at Rookie Moms. Heather and Whitney threw this crafty party along with the folks at Underwriter’s Laboratory to spread some holiday cheer while passing along safety tips about holiday decorating in general and light safety in particular.

While I knew that Wyatt would like running around with the other kids and eating pizza, I wasn’t sure if he would be all that into the actual wreath making. But he surprised me and worked his little fingers to the bone punching circles out of patterned paper and directing me to add a string of lights, ribbon, a funky gold pine cone and letters to spell out his name to his wreath. I placed everything exactly as he directed me to and this is the final product:

Not too shabby! We will be hanging this in our front window when I get my act together and put up the Christmas decorations some time in the next few days.

The high point for me was when the photographer, Erin Nelson, pulled Wyatt and me aside to take a few pictures of us together. As the family photographer, I’m almost always behind the camera and very rarely in front of it. I’ll occasionally manage to take a self portrait that I like, but it’s really rare that any photos are taken of me with the kids. So when I saw this photo in Erin’s gallery, I about died:

What mom doesn’t want a photo like that with her boy?

And this is totally unrelated to wreath-making, holiday lights or brilliant photographers, but you have to check out this turkey frying video from the UL folks. Jeebus! I can assure you we will never be frying a turkey at our house!

All photos by Erin Leigh Photography. More pictures of our wreath-making are in her Flickr set here.

Disclosure: I received wreath-making supplies, safety advice, 2 slices of pizza, a slice of sweet potato pie, a print of the photo above, and the pleasure of spending time with crafty people and a slew of cute kids at the Safe and Bright holiday party. And then I wrote this blog post. Hopefully the FCC won’t throw me in the big house now that I’ve told you all that.

Tagged as: christmas, crafts, holiday, holiday lights, lights, rookiemoms, safeandbright, UL, underwriters laboratory, wreath