This is a story of beginnings. Both for my family and a young foreign student named Enel. As many of you know, we are the parents of three boys and outside of Kristin, we have never had the experience of a female staying in our home for a long period of time. Enel is the oldest of four daughters and grew up in a small village in Estonia. She came to live with us last August for her last year of college. How she came to live in our home is a subject for another story. She came to us sort of shy, very quiet and with her boyfriend, Sean (but he did not live with us). He did show up at the house a lot and sometimes late at night. Watching the interaction between the two, I could tell that she did not have much experience with boys. Fortunately for Enel, my youngest son Dylan and I had plenty of experience with boys. We showed her how a young man should treat a lady. We gave her lots of privacy, but also how to stand up for herself. We even made sure that when Sean would come to pick her up he always came to the door. I don’t think that we ever left the toilet seat up, at least not on purpose.  I think she learned her lessons well.

It was a fun eleven months watching Enel grow into poised young woman even though she ate some odd things like salads and some kind of smelly fish. She would haul her food up the stairs and lay it all out on the counter and begin to assemble her meals. She loved her salads and would even put salad stuff into the blender for her morning smoothie. And during this time, we watched as Sean and Enel grew in their relationship and got engaged. So now Enel has graduated from college and has thrown herself into full blown wedding mode. There are wedding things (glue guns, craft things, spray paint, table center pieces) everywhere. If it could be associated with the wedding it was in our house. Pressures were mounting, patience was being tested and Enel had to use all that Dylan and I taught her during the last few weeks. It was truly a sight to behold.

Now we come to the next beginning. Sean and Enel had a cool website for their wedding where we found the gift registry pages. As we were looking over the items I saw that they had picked out “salad hands”. The picture was rather small, so we decided to go to the store and look at them. Here is the picture that I took while in the store. A pair of bamboo, machine cut, boring looking hands. There were six pairs on the rack and everyone of them looked the same. I knew that they would work fine, but not for Enel. This was a girl who packed up, left her family, came to America and ate so much salad that she would wear out a pair of these hands in no time. I could not buy them for Sean and Enel.

These kids needed something just for them.  So I told Kristin that I would make them a pair.

So I did and I’m actually using them as a launching pad for another section of this blog  called “Stuff I build”. Over the next couple of days my middle son, Collin, will be taking pictures of items that I have built over the years and posting them to the site. These are all hand tooled using re-purposed wood. These hands are made from pecan cut out of a headboard  given to me a few years ago. The black wood is Ebony and the white letters are Holly  inlaid into the Ebony. Sean and Enel are currently on their honeymoon and do not have a clue about any of this, but I do hope that they will get many years of salads out of these hands.

Thanks for perusing,

Gary