For my birthday this year I decided that I wanted the family to give me gifts of creativity. I asked them all to come with me to a local “paint your own pottery” shop.  These shops are wonderful because you can go in and paint a work of art on some ceramic creation, the shop will glaze and fire it, and you have a dishwasher safe, functional keepsake.  I have a whole set of hand painted dishes after hours and hours of painting.  I had each of my family members paint a ceramic tile for our future home.  I hope to eventually collect enough tiles to make a completely unique backsplash in the kitchen.  I am currently up to about fifteen 6″x6″ tiles.  I may be dreaming, but I think I’ll need a few more to make a full backsplash.  The tile I made for myself was a handprint creation.  I made my kids handprints into elephants.  If you look around you will find that you can make just about any animal this way.  I love the idea of the whole family contributing to our future home, but love even more that I will have these handprints out where I can see them every day as a wonderful memory of my children when they were tiny.