50 Sucks--My Husband's Birthday Gift

This past weekend my husband turned 50 years old. I never do an "Over the Hill" theme for him because I'm only a few years behind! 

He's not a big party person and yet we managed to get two small gatherings in over the weekend. First was one with his family. Mija made a dump cake for that occasion. Second gathering was with our small group from church.

Mija and I made a gift which we present him with at his family's house and continued to share it the next evening. I've been waiting for a few years to make this for him!

We chose a basket and used a Styrofoam ball which would give the finished product a nice shape. We painted half the ball black, so it wouldn't be so noticeable.

We ran out of paint part way and finished the rest with a couple of layers of marker.

Then we picked out 49 suckers. We chose Tootsie Roll Pops and Blow Pops for the variety of color and texture. We also picked out a few others for accent pieces.

If you noticed, each sucker was tied with a golden ribbon (for 50 years you know) and then we curled them.
This was the first time mija was introduced to curling ribbon. She was very impressed.

I realized that everything safety procedure I had taught her about scissors was undone with this one activity! Holding scissors closed and the blades away from you fingers became, 

"Hold the scissors open. Put your thumb and ribbon along the 

sharp edge of the blade and pull!"

We had found a large sucker at Party City which actually said, "50 Sucks." I had planned on having to make one, but this saved me a BIG step. That became our 50th sucker. We then assembled our "bouquet" as it were.

It went all the way around. 3D. Here's the back.

50 Sucks took two bags of suckers and a few extra to accomplish. There was only one or two left to celebrate with after making it. Of course, mija found one of the extra suckers!

He thoroughly loved it. Everyone was impressed that 1) we made and 2) how many suckers 50 actually was! ;-)