a birthday gift.

one afternoon jeremiah and i were watching tv when my mother-in-law, digging in her linen chest, found an old linen bag that our baba had sent to her son (my father-in-law) with some peppers from macedonia. the linen bag was all stained from the peppers and the addresses, written in babas handwriting, were mostly in macedonian. the first thing that came into my head is what an amazing shadow box this would make. well it just so happened that my father-in-law's birthday was in 2 weeks...how perfect this would be for that occasion. since he is a successful doctor and is fortunate enough to buy whatever he wants, this usually makes buying a gift fairly difficult each year. but it didn't always used to be that way.


you see he immigrated to america in 1973 with twenty dollars in his pocket and maybe enough english to introduce himself. but right away he got a job and enrolled in college. he mastered english in an incredibly small amount of time and with a night job working for ups, went on to become a doctor in chiropractic. he is a hard worker to say the least and by far the most generous man i have ever met.


so, jeremiah and i put our creative heads together to make something to honor his life and where he came from...here's the result...




the envelope that had his naturalization papers in it...

i was able to find twenty dollars worth of uncirculated quarters from 1973 and just hot-glued them in there...love me some ebay!
since his faith is the most important thing in his life we wanted to make sure something was in the box that represented that...we found one of his first bibles with this amazing chicken scratch on literally every page. we chose this particular page because he had highlighted a verse in the same blue as the blue in the address. the verse says, 'the lord will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, oh lord, endureth forever: forsake not the work of thine own hands.'