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Well today is a special day in our house. Today marks the end and a new beginning for the teenage boy at SimpleSouthernLife. It is the end of his days in middle school and the beginning of his days in Upper School (what we call High School). It is so hard for me to believe that he will be a freshman after his last final exam today. But I am so very excited and extremely proud of him too! As much as we could we really enjoyed Middle School, I mean who really likes Middle School anyway? No one! But we survived the Middle School drama and changes and all the ups and downs that Middle School offers.

In typical behavior last night I found myself thinking about all of the people who have helped us through these trying Middle School days these last few years! So after dinner I decided (at 7:30 pm last night) that we should properly thank a few people with end of year teacher gifts. Since he is in Middle School it is a tad tricky to do something that is nice and not overly cutesy that would be more appropriate for a Lower School teacher. After all we certainly don’t want him to get made fun of on the last day of Middle School, because that would never happen! And most of all when you are starting so late in the evening on a project like this there are two key factors for success: easy and cheap! I think we accomplished both!

So the end and a new beginning is happening with these awesome (if I do say so myself) succulent gifts! We dashed to the local dollar store and picked up these cute square glass candle holders (I use these all the time for my favorite Circle E candle refills. Bam, $4 and done! Next we headed to our local big box home improvement store and picked up the succulents and potting soil. Bam, $24 and done!

Next we headed back home to assemble. Now I can admit that I had the rest of the craft supplies at home for this project and if you caught my SimpleSouthernLife Memorial Day Celebration post you will recognize the red and blue ribbon! So we cut all the ribbon, hot glued the burlap ribbon to the glass container (and got a million burns on my fingers) and finally used the teenage boys finger to help tie the super tight knots and we were done! Well…almost!

Here is where I go into overdrive. Like mega overdrive! I decided we needed little thank you card attached to each of the little gifts. Well, we had exactly one piece of the red and white gingham check paper and it was not 8×11! So I first marked and trimmed the paper down so it would fit in the printer and go through without any issues! We decided on a font (harder than you might think with dual opinions on the subject) and then laid out our simple thank you words. This is the first time we have tried to set up a document with precise placement in the new (we have had it over a year) Macbook Air. So honestly we struggled. A LOT. So I got kinda creative and just printed it four different times, adjusting the paper each time! Problem solved! Sort of.

I had to trim all of the paper to fit the one piece of red card stock we had. No pressure. I glued the note to the cards and then realized they were too big to punch holes is and attach to the ribbon. So I took our life-long supply of craft sticks and glued the notes to them! Now it looks like garden stakes (of course that was what I was going for all along-ha)! They actually turned out really cute, in my opinion and I could not be happier to give these to four wonderful people who have helped us through these last few years!

So today as we leave for school it is rather bitter sweet. It is the end and a new beginning of chapters in both of our lives. It is a busy day, thankfully so I am hoping I don’t cry with the emotions of everything, but knowing me I will probably tear up a time or two! It really does seem just like yesterday when I was taking this young man to Kindergarten. Time certainly marches on, but I really wish that it would just slow down just a tad!