Little kitchen stools

We have an abundance of stools in our house (and I'm just talking about the kind you stand on here - never mind the other kind!).  We have stools in the kitchen, in the downstairs bathroom and in the upstairs bathroom.  I'll admit, the stool in the kitchen is not only for the kids - I also use it to reach the high stuff in my cupboards (I'm only 5'4'').  Having a stool around is handy, especially when your kids love to "help out" as much as mine do, but it was always a bit of a fuss over who got to use the stool in the kitchen and who had to go get the one from the bathroom to use.  So I asked my father-in-law (who is an extremely talented woodworker - you can see some of his other stuff on my blog here, here and here, or more on his blog) to make the kids each their own stool.  Then, so there would be no confusion (i.e. arguments) over whose is whose, I painted their names on them and added their footprints.  The kids each picked their own color.  I love how they turned out! 

Emmett's footprints didn't turn out so well the first time (they looked more like big, smeary blobs of paint), so I sanded them off and we redid them.  The second time around I used a lot less paint on his feet, and then filled in a few "sparse" spots afterwards.  I think I did a bit too much touching up, though, because they look almost a bit too perfect now (but I'll live with it - I don't want to sand again!).  Annika's look more like real footprints.  For the lettering, I used this simple technique, and it worked really well.

I wanted to get a picture of the stools "in action", but of course, the kids didn't want to cooperate! :P  So you'll have to take my word that they work great - and they're sturdy enough that I can use them too! :)