A Very Special Teddy Bear

On my fifth birthday, my grandma gave me a teddy bear. I promptly named him "Teddy," and from that moment on, he was my favorite stuffed toy. He slept with me every night and I even took him with me when I slept over at friends' houses. I talked to him when I was lonely, and I could often be seen cradling this very special teddy bear in my arms.

Many years later, as an adult, I finally gave in and boxed him up with a few other stuffed toys from my childhood. By then, he was dirty from years of being played with and loved and his fur was no longer fluffy, but it just gave him the look of a well-loved teddy bear.

Shortly after my fifth child, Gabriella, was born, I found Teddy as I was going through some old boxes of mine. I put him in her crib that night. To this day (Gabby is now 7 years old), Teddy is her favorite stuffed toy. He's still dirty and worn looking, but he is still loved immensely by a little girl.

As of my last birthday, assuming Teddy was made in the year he was bought and presented to me, Teddy was a 33 year old teddy bear.

From Gabriella's love for Teddy, I have come to two conclusions:

Like mother, like daughter!

That really is one very special teddy bear!

Do you have anything from your childhood that now belongs to your kids and is as special to them as it was to you?

Looking Into My Future

"Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future."
~Gail Lumet Buckley



The reason I used this photo with the quote is because the little redhead looking into the mirror is me as a child, and the child looking back from within the mirror is my oldest child (back when she was about that age).

I created this photo manipulation years ago, and I thought other moms might like to try and make one of their own, so I decided to share it. It doesn't take a huge amount of photo editing skill. (I know it doesn't
because I am not particularly skilled.)

It does, however, mean you have to have a photo of yourself as a child looking into a mirror so that your face is showing. Not everyone will have a photo like this, but for those that do, they can make one of these generation pictures too! It also helps if you have a dress that your child can wear that is at least similar to the one you wore in the photo as a child and you'll need a mirror to take the photo of your child looking into.

I was fortunate in that my mom had saved the dress I wore in the photo as a child, and my sister took photos of my daughter in a similar pose at a similar age in the same dress.

The only cropping I had to do was of my daughter's face in the mirror in her photo. I then pasted it into the mirror in my photo and smoothed the edges to make it blend. I had previously tried this with a regular, non-mirrored image of my daughter and it didn't look right; it made the image in the frame look more like a photograph the child-me was looking at than a mirror. It had to be a reflected image of her that I used to paste into the mirror.

I then bordered the image and added the text.

I did use a little bit more skill in this than is needed to do this successfully. I actually cropped my daughter's image out, and before I pasted it, I added a photograph I had taken of a sunset sky to the background within the mirror. This isn't necessary for this picture, but it was an added touch I wanted to make. And there was also a lot of touching up that had to be done to the original scan of the photo of me as a child because it was a scan of a photograph that was old and had some of the fading and discoloration that can happen with age in photos.

The photography part of this might take a bit of effort and ingenuity, but once you've got the right photos, the rest is easy.