Star of the Week!

At Sloan each child gets to be the "Star of the Week" during the school year, and it just so happens Riley is "Star of the Week" this week. That means we (as in I until I called for backup!) get to do a star to represent all Riley's favorite things that will hang in his classroom all week, and I can take a special snack for his class one day! When he's older we'll do it together, and he'll be able to speak to each of them. But since he's so young, I wanted to mainly do pictures of the things he likes that he can point out and say by himself.

Of course, they give me the Star on Thursday before we're supposed to have it done by Monday! Ugh! Hello! I'm a much bigger planner than that! Needless to say, I felt behind the ball before I even got started! Even so, it turned out great and it captures all of Riley's Current Favorite things!!

Many thanks to Talana for coming over to help me do the star at the last possible moment on Saturday. I spent Friday evening shopping for scrapbooking stickers, then Saturday morning uploading pictures from all our cameras and going through them to pick out ones to be printed at Walgreens. I'm ashamed to even admit that our nice Nikon camera had not been uploaded from since JANUARY! Hello Misty! Not good! I told Talana my suggestion for the school was going to be to NOT have a Star of the Week during December! OMG! We already have enough to do!! The good news is that as I was going through all our pictures for this, I already came up with some themes for pages in his memory book I make for family each year.

Anyway, I had a very loose vision, bought a bunch of stickers and went through and printed out pictures of his current favorite things, but Talana totally executed on the vision! She's a Master Certified Scrapbooker (if there were such a thing)! :) Once again - she comes through for us like family! She's babysat for us only 2nd to GiGi and is always there to lend a hand and help us out with any crazy thing we may have going on! That's true friendship! Love you Talana Banana!!

Of course, we had to make the background "flagish" considering they are one of his top 3 favorite things! :) I intended to have more basketball on the star too so as to represent the order of his favorite things, but that just didn't work once we started lying things out.

Anyway - here's the Star! The top leg is Zoo - with pictures of Riley and a gorilla and me and Riley in front of eledents (elephants - his #3 favorite thing). The left leg is swimming with Daddy in a pool and lake, splashing Mommy with water while we were in Cozumel, and a picture of the ocean from our room in Cozumel. The middle picture is obviously a family pic from our Christmas card last year because I realized I don't have any other family pics! ugh! The bottom left leg includes from bottom to top, bicycle, basketball or "shoot it" as Riley says, pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse from Cozumel - cake cakes as he calls them, and an airplane up in the sky! The bottom right leg includes from bottom to top - Riley as Buzz Year going down a slide, Buzz Year!, another basketball, Lightening McQueen from Cars and of course BARNEY!! The picture in the middle of the bottom legs is 5 flags hanging on our hotel in Cozumel that Riley wanted to "Reach it" every time we walked by them! Then the right leg is Mommy, Daddy, B - his bear he sleeps with and his teacher Dina who he regularly calls me! :) But I'm not jealous because I want him to love his teacher that much!

Anyway - you can't see the details in these pictures, but you get the idea!

Now I just gotta figure out that special snack.....I'm thinking animal crackers or something "Toy Story" to go with his favorite things! I guess I have til Friday, so plenty of time! ha!

Speaking of - his favorites we'd would rank them in the following order:
#1 - BASKETBALL~ I was thinking the other day - there has not been ONE day go by that Riley has not dunked on that basketball goal since he got it for Christmas last year! Seriously! Not one day! And he still gets just as excited EVERY single day! There's a lot more commentary now though like ew, almost Mommy, missed it, made it, yea, shoot it, pass it, dunk it, etc. And if anyone is playing at the park, they always crack up that he says ew or awe when they miss it too.
#2 - Barney ~ He will grab the remotes and ask for Barney by name, and that's the ONLY 30 minutes of the day that he sits still! What more can you say?! Santa *may* bring Riley tickets to Barney Live in his stocking, so I can only imagine how exciting that outing will be!! Especially for Mom and Dad too! :)
#3 - Gotta be FWAGS! MOMMY! FWAGS! WOW! ~ Which is what I hear almost EVERY morning and afternoon the the way to and from school.

#4 - Eledents (followed by a trumpet eledent sound now)  ~ Elephants- LOVES them!
#5 - Monkeys ~ They are quickly moving in on the eledents!