DIY birthday advent calendar for the baseball lover!

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While washing my sheets at 2:30 in the morning after waking up to one of my cats barfing on my head, I knew it was going to be a very special kind of day.

I managed to dodge the offending cat barf, but my bedding did not. So as I was dragging my kibble soaked Rough Linen sheets down the stairs at 2:30 in the morning to wash them, I thought about all the loving mothers out there who do this every flu season with their kids many times over. Only instead of cat kibble on the sheets it's meatloaf and Kraft Dinner and red licorice and that putrid smelling bile. And I think deep down from the depths of my soul that these kind hearted, warriors of the world, these mothers with no sleep and germy homes, who pat the sweat soaked foreheads of their barf smeared babies ... really should have just got a cat.

Also cats rarely grow up to be strippers.

The one mother I thought of in particular is my niece who started having kids as soon as she got married, knocked 3 of them out in a row and every winter has to endure the barfing household syndrome. Luckily her kids were easily trained. They, unlike my cats, learned to throw up in a bucket, not on their sheets from a very young age. (although there is the odd sheet casualty)

Her very best, CHAMPION bucket thrower upper is her middle child, Ollie.

It was that very Ollie's birthday a few weeks ago and he, like every other child that has seen my incredibly famous Birthday Advent Calendar, hinted that's what he wanted to. He would have been perfectly happy with my pink, sparkly version but since Ollie loves baseball ... that's the direction I went.

I'll give you the quick version of the directions here but if you want in depth directions on the basics of making a Birthday Advent Calendar read my original post on it.

This time around I figured out that it's a lot easier to cut the holes out of the foam core board by using a hole saw as opposed to an Xacto knife.

So you cut your holes out, then glue tissue paper on the backside of the board. Those are the cool little holes that the gift recipient will punch through to get to their gifts! It's all very Price is Right.

The easiest way to turn this into a baseball themed calendar was to add baseball doors. These are just styrofoam balls I got at the dollar store, cut in half.

Use a sharp knife and just slice through them. Then draw stitching marks along the sides of all of them with a Sharpie. Real baseball stitching is red, but I went with black. Because I had a black Sharpie on hand. That's the same reasoning that led me to eat an entire bag of cherries and half a bag of potato chips for dinner the other night.

Fill your plastic cups with birthday whatnots and then hot glue them to the back of the board right over the tissue paper holes.

This particular calendar has chocolates, bubbles, cozy socks, money, glow sticks, silly putty and more fun things. About 20 more as a matter of fact.

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We'll email you this post, so you can refer to it later.

The holes are all numbered from 1-30 with the help of sparkly number stickers and my two agile fingers.

Each baseball "door" is just stuck on with some 2 way tape. So to gain access to the tissue paper punch out, the fantastically lucky recipient of this gift (barfing Ollie), just has to pull away the baseball and punch through the paper. Then the baseball can be stuck right back on the calendar.

After the doors and cups are done it's just a matter of tricking it out however you want. Usually by this point you're getting pretty tired of it all and rolls of washi tape are usually the easiest way to get it done.

The huge letters for the name are just sparkly stick-on letters from the dollar store with ...