now that all of our kiddos have finally gotten their Christmas gifts from their favoritest aunt and uncle, i can share my special project. those who know us are aware that we travel a lot but we’re not huge on souvenirs. on our epic trip this past fall (am i ever going to post that travel log?), we were limited by time – the best destinations, Egypt and Israel, were crazy busy trying to see everything we possibly could – and packing space since i was very strict about our baggage limitations for the month overseas as i’m too cheap to pay for my bags to fly. we did make sure that we fulfilled specific requests, which were surprisingly few and highly reasonable. but we also had to bring back some gifts. for all the ladies/girls, we bought small pieces of murano glass from our quick tour of venice. my biggest thing, however, was that i wanted to have something meaningful for all the kiddos from the Holy Land. in our two days of frantic touring, we only had a couple souvenir opportunities and the nice stuff was either too big for our luggage space or too expensive (i really wish i would have bought that gorgeous olive wood nativity that i fell in love with in Bethlehem. we would have had to ship it back home but, in retrospect, it would have been worthwhile). my solution was to buy a bigger bottle of Holy water for hubby’s uncle (a special request from him) and use some of the water to hand-craft gifts for the kids. i ordered some cross-shaped glass vials and bought some jewelry cord, ends, and clasps. i couldn’t find any alpha beads small enough to fit in the vials so i ended up having to find some plain 3mm beads and write on them myself to form each kid’s name. i even did a couple of them with chips of wood which i felt gave it a really cool effect, considering that they were floating in Holy water. i’m a bit ashamed of how much cursing occurred during the assembly of these but we prayed over them when they were finished so i think that made up for it. i also prayed for each kid, individually, while i was working on theirs. i was really happy with the final product and i think all of the kids (well, all but the two infants) actually appreciated them.