shopping | 4 Mothers

School is winding down, and if you haven’t already thought about a thank you gift for your child’s teacher (or if you don’t have a class parent organizing a joint gift), here are three quick options:

Over at Orange You Glad are candy jars filled with sweet treats. Imagine these filled with your child’s teacher’s favourite candy . They’re easy to make — you just need some canning jars from your local hardware store.

Image credit: http://ididntsaybanana.blogspot.ca/2011/05/thank-you-teacher-gifts.html

Aren’t the labels adorable? You can find them at heirloompaperie.com

I’ve ordered from Susie over at Mommy Pads and More a couple of times now, and have been really happy with both her service and her product. You can have notepads printed in your choice of colours and sizes, personalized with your child’s teacher’s name. These also make good gifts for music teachers, day care teachers and coaches. Some of the boys’ previous teachers liked them so much, they now order their own each year:

Gibson notepad from Mommy Pads and More

One last option, if time is running short: consider a gift card for CanadaHelps. CanadaHelps is a registered Canadian charity whose goal is to make giving to charity simple. And it really is simple: purchase a gift card in any denomination, and give it to your child’s teacher, who can then use the card to make a donation in that amount to their favourite Canadian charity. As purchaser, you get the tax receipt for the donation. This is a great gift for the socially conscious teacher who probably doesn’t need another coffee mug!

My name is Marcelle, and I’m a Pinterest junkie.

It wasn’t always this way. As an inveterate web surfer, I’ve collected a prodigious number of internet bookmarks on three different computers. I bookmark everything, from recipes to Christmas crafts* to websites featuring the most perfect apartments ever. I have 25 pages of favourite shops on Etsy. I can spend hours “decorating” my next house. But because my bookmarks are spread over three computers and seven years, when I want to find something — that perfect recipe for meatloaf, for example — I have to search around, inevitably forgetting what I was looking for in the process.

Enter Pinterest. Pinterest is described as a online pinboard — a place to keep track of all those cool things you find while surfing the net, and to see what others people like as well. Other people can repin your favourites on their own boards and comment on items you’ve pinned. Part planning tool, part social media site, Pinterest lets me indulge in my compulsive need to categorize, file and save, and it’s fun, too. Time Magazine named it one of the best websites of 2011. I’ve seen people use these virtual pin boards to keep track of favourite books and music, coordinate book clubs and plan special events such as weddings.

The best part of Pinterest is looking around at other people’s “pins” — things other people find interesting. But that’s because I’m nosy, um, I mean, curious.

And without Pinterest, I’d never know about this, which a friend of mine pinned: