Every shadow box has a story...

Last weekend the Spouse and I tried to make some good use of the warm weather to begin our spring cleaning of the garage. This will, unfortunately, be an ongoing project the whole season, but we did at least get a jump start on it. Historically, we only tackle projects of this nature when forced to do so by circumstances like an impending move or a flood, so it’s always a little exciting to see what forgotten treasures we’ll uncover when we crack open the Rubbermaid bins that encircle our garage.

Not surprisingly, there were some great finds as we went along… a few old annuals, some puzzle pieces that have been MIA for months, a mysterious Jimmy Buffet songbook, a piece of our nativity set, some priceless old pictures, etc.

But, here is a picture of my favorite discovery of all. It will need an explanation…

Please join me in a moment of silence as we take in the beauty of my first ever Mother’s Day gift from the Spouse.

There’s so much that I love about the way this picture captures the essence of this project that I don’t even know where to start. First, in case you can’t make them out… the stone pieces to the left of the piece of wood are the Preschooler’s tiny handprints which the Spouse casted and baked while I was out one afternoon (presumably at one of my many trips to the day spa). The dark piece of wood is the board on which the handprints were originally mounted with some sort of adhesive. From here I’m a little unsure of what the plan was, but I think he intended to do some additional mounting of the wood to the inside of the shadow box for a triple-layer effect of sorts. For certain, it was going to be a very dramatic presentation of the handprints. And, understandably, this was going to take considerable time and glue. So, this is as far as the project made it and basically the state in which it was presented. If you use your imagination I bet you can see where he was going with this…

And, I love it. Mostly because when I think about the Spouse putting our firstborn’s 3-month old little hands into that mixture and trying to figure out how to bake the thing and put it all together… I just want to marry him all over again.

Of course, we laughed and laughed (well, I laughed and laughed) when we rediscovered this gift. Then I went off on some tangent about how we really need to re-read The 5 Love Languages before Mother’s Day this year…

Fortunately, the Spouse’s tolerance for my sense of humor is nearly as big as his artistic vision.

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