Happy Birthday to my son...

Today is my son's {gulp} 40th birthday!! I can hardly believe that my little boy is 40 years old. I must have given birth when I was about 5 years old. Surely I'm not over 45 myself. Ha ha!!

Anyway, 40 is a milestone and needed a special card to let him know how much we love and admire the wonderful man he has become. Here is what I came up with:

I got this idea from Helen over at It's All Fiddlefart. She's done a number of these cards and if you search through her blog, I'm sure you'll find more of them plus a lot of other great ideas.

I created the basic design of the card in Microsoft Publisher. I cut two layers of the word "Exclusive" so that I could pop this up on foam squares.

This photo is of my son when he was a year old. He really is eating his birthday cake here. Do you see the balloons I added with real thread and tied to the spindle on his high chair? I did end up trimming that long thread before I sent him the card. I pierced a hole on either side of the spindle, used a needle to pull the thread to the back and then up again on the other side, and finally tied them together in a bow.

Wasn't he an adorable little boy? His bib says "Today I am a li'l stinker." He could definitely be a little stinker at times, but he always had so much charm that he could melt my heart in no time flat.

I don't know if you've noticed but when you see those blank spaces in the text, it's because I've erased his last name using Photoshop, just to give him some anonymity here.

The little gifts were punched out with the Martha Stewart deep-edge "Gifts" punch. One of my daughters gave me this punch for Christmas. It makes the perfect little gifts and I can see adding them along with all kinds of images on my cards. With their simple shapes, they are so easy to back with a contrasting color of cardstock.

You can see on Scott's card that I punched a gift out of blue paper and one out of a gold glitter paper. Then I backed them with a contrasting color and popped them up on some foam squares.

On the inside, I added a black mat to mirror the one on the front of the card, and I also added a couple more balloons (Cuttlebug die). For these balloons, I just drew on the strings.

This card was so much fun to make, even though it's kind of tough to admit that I have a 40-year-old child. He'll always be about 4 or 5 in my mind and ageless in my heart!

Happy Birthday, Scott!  I love you!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl