benjamantium and judygen

still out on vacation! here's a freeze-dried post that i made in advance for you to rehydrate like astronaut tang and devour while we're off getting a tan (re: jesse and judah getting a tan, keight getting more wrinkles and future dermatological trouble spots).

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one of the best things about fancying myself crafty is getting to MAKE presents for people. buying is fun, but i am poor and a bad chooser most of the time. when you give someone something handmade you usually save money, but the time investment in the item is what makes it special or memorable. even if the gift isn't awesome or well-made, the recipient knows you spent some hours on it and will appreciate it and at least get a pity use or two out of whatever it is. plus...one of a kind!

natalie, a bff of mine and mother to judah's only option for a bff, benjamin, gives the. best. presents. she's always right on time with the occasion or holiday even though they live in england and she has super cool taste. for judah's bday, the braden family sent judah a super cool animal book that is in english and spanish (good to know the spanish term for guinea pig is cobaya) as well as this awesome onesie that you may have seen him in many times because we put him in it, oh, every time it's clean because it's first string awesome.

love the color, love the ringer, love the design. judah loves his USB-equipped stuffed animal...surprisingly.

so when the bradens came to town for summer break i was ecstatic in general because no one should have to live without natalie in their vicinity, but also thrilled to get to make and give benj his birthday present (albeit late). i wanted something that he could wear and that i could make a matching version of for judah because having sons two days apart lets us get our twinsie-fix every so often by dressing them the exact same.

my vision for creative theme here was to tap in to the inevitable nerd-factor that these boys have lying dormant in their DNA waiting to rear its bespectacled head and assert itself. as children of star wars obsessed (2/4), tech-graduates (3/4) who live the nerd-life loud and proud, there's no way they can have avoided a healthy dose of those genes. so here's what i came up with: i gave them their own elements in the periodic table.

the "atomic weight" number is benj's birthday, Bn is his atomic symbol and the rest is obvious

this project (freezer paper stencils) took a shockingly long amount of time due to the many different layers of the little multi-colored atom and the intricate nature of x-acto knifing our all those little letters. so when i finally finished (think 5 hours) benj's, i was kind of dreading making judah his matching one. but the second try was much faster thanks to learning from my inefficiencies the first time around. and i knew this was too preciously nerdy of a chance to dress alike to pass up. they aren't perfectly matching because i kept having to thicken benj's border because of mess ups and judah's has several white marks on his from where i had to paint over dark smudges of other colors.

one little atom-smasher on the move.

it was very tempting to make up new elements that just sounded like the boys' names instead of using their names for the periodic table entries. benjamantium and judygen were the best i could come up with and i just couldn't bring myself to put those in permanent ink onto shirts they would have to wear around. can you imagine the questions we would get?

i don't have a pic of benj in his yet because it was just me and nat at dinner when i gave his present to her (what? like he even would have appreciated it! we all know baby presents are really just for the moms), but i can't wait to see him in it and especially together with judah. hopefully in public. maybe we'll take them to tech and have people stop us and tell us why the atom is totally scientifically incorrect and unrealistic and could never happen in real chemistry. that sounds FUN.