September 27, 2007

A New Royal Carriage

A couple of weeks ago we needed to replace our "Royal Carriage", our Chevy Malibu, due to problems that were unable tobe diagonsed without spending lots of money. We are not a well off royal family. Therefore, the King & I opted to replace the failing vechile. We chose not only to upgrade the space but also to upgrade the luxuries on the new vechile. Our "carriage" of choice? A 2005 Chrylser Town & Country Mini Van. There are several things I really like about this van. DUal sliding doors, the multi dics DVD player & headphones for the passengers behind the front seats, dual climate control, undeseat stow-n-go as well as the third row of seats that fold down into the bottom of the van. We will have plenty of space to transport everything we need for over night excurions to the forest. Not to mention an additonal Prince or Princess if that is what the future holds. No, I'm not aware of that happening anytime soon.

Why the royal references you ask? Well, it is because King Robert, better known as King Daddy to the Princesses in residence, is taking us to a far away kingdom called Dinseyland. For King Daddys birthday the princesses & I made him a book. It was about our travels to the Royal Kingdom in Febuary of 2006. The gift was the eldest duaghters idea & she dictated the entire story to me. I wrote it down & did a little bit of editing, not all of which she agreed to. Since it was her story, comming from her then 4 year old mind, I only included the changes that were Princess approved.

Next I procedded to glue the pages together, giving them additional strength. Finally binding them with plain "golden" brads. The front & back covers were made of posterboard in the king's favorite color.




I wrote out the story & illustrated it, leaving room for addtional illustrations by the Princess.





She indeed added her own illustrations as well as color to many of these pages & had a ball in doing so. We used photos taken during our visit as references for the illustraions & some of the colors during this two week process.

Upon presentation to the King, he scooped up his Princesses & proceeded to read the story to them. The King is not big on books. He chooses to keep this treasure in the confines of his royal bedside table.

The memories made during the creation of the book "A Royal Disneyland Adventure", will be among those I shall forever cherish. Maybe one of these days, I'll finally get around to scanning & posting of this book & it's images here on Purple Puddles. Until then, enjoy your family & all of the memories you make together.

2 comments:

Carolyn F said...

Adorable book! We got a van in March for the first time, and I am loving it -- so will you!

Mary said...

We had fun making it.

We LOVE our van. We don't love filling it up with gasoline though. :-(

Oh well, we can't afford a hybrid & we needed the space. We had a van before we had our Malibu so we had an idea of what gasoline costs would be.