You can tell a birthday is coming up!

I can go to bed happy tonight knowing my son is proud to give home made birthday gifts! My youngest has a birthday party this week for the 5 year old twins in his class and I have decided to start a tradition!  If he gets invited to a birthday the child will get a personalised pump bag!  When I was at school everyone had a home made pump bag. Most were made from left over curtain fabric and looked ok albeit a bit naff but some would shine out on the coat rack and be the envy of every kid in the class. Even when my eldest (22 next week) started school a fair few children still had home made bags. The quality of the 'homemade' was clearly on a downward spiral though as home sewing was very much out of fashion then and the 'cool' kids mums had brought them branded PE bags with Adidas or Nike on them.  Last September my youngest stood alone on the coat rack with the only homemade PE bag! I let him choose the fabric  - we had snakes on one side and football on the other!  Good choice I thought. Even better he was proud to carry it in.  His teacher told him how easy it was to find his pump bag !  No wonder everyone else had red plastic ones!  But now he has company - a purple and yellow number given to Aimee (given last year and blogged here) and next week we will hopefully find Ashleys blue and orange sharks and Kaitlyns blue and pink Tinkerbell!  By the end of the year we may even have a whole rack of brightly coloured pump bags to cheer the classroom and maybe even a few mums who might be inspired to start home sewing again!