The Next Step

I posted the story about making napkin-wrapper smiles on my Facebook page. It was very well received and generated plenty of positive comments. I thought how much fun it would be if others would join in, even if just within their own families, though I knew that tracking anything like that would be pretty much impossible.

Then I received an email containing this picture, asking "Can I join the club?"

The sender was one of my dearest friends, TK, a woman I'd known since the early 70s and with whom I have shared many adventures over the years. I couldn't have been more delighted and asked her permission to post the photo on Facebook. She was kind enough to grant that permission and the picture got added. Once again the results were positive and I told friends I was going to start a blog about this to see if I could get others to send photos, too.

In The Beginning

It started at a Cracker Barrel in Raleigh, North Carolina, while dining with my twin five-year-old grandchildren. On occasion, they found it difficult to remain patient awaiting the arrival of their pancakes and would become restless (a nice word for cranky).

On one such occasion the restlessness was reaching a high level and the usual distraction methods just weren't working. In an effort to make them laugh, I took the paper wrapper from around the napkin/cutlery and, using the crayons provided to child diners, drew a smile to hold up to my face. Fortunately, it worked. It worked so well, in fact, that all the wrappers at our table were immediately located and drawn upon. We had an assortment of smiles, with and without teeth, and had a great amount of fun. This has become our tradition at Cracker Barrel!

We've now gotten to the point where, even if dining apart, we look for napkin wrappers on which to draw the smile......then have a picture taken to be sent to one another. These are the first two photos: