Keepsakes and Memories

     The reason I started writing this blog (years ago) was to find a way to document our family history for my children.   James has this vision of Ava or Sydney sitting on a train heading to work some day, downloading my blog entries off our data cloud and reading stories about their wild antics in childhood.  I have visions of Jack's future wife reading and wondering what she is getting into with me as a mother-in-law.   Who knows how or where this blog will resurface later in life, but it is my hope that my kids will read parts of it and know how much fun we had...how hard I tried...how much we love them!!

     When I was a child, my mom kept baby books.  There are little mementos thrown in along the way.  A lock of our hair, newspaper clippings, elementary school certificates and artwork.  I believe most of my childhood experience (minus photos and old-school VHS video) fits neatly into one banker's box.  When visiting I have hauled it out to examine and share with James and the kids.  I think I am due for a trip down memory lane again on my next visit home.  My dad kept a trip journal on our family vacations and wrote us personalized Christmas stories every year. These are the ways they documented the passing of time and the important events in our family history.  They are so special.

     My generation documents family history differently.   We record our children's milestones in our Facebook statuses.  We post a photo.  We add and entry to our Google Calendar.  We snap a photo and let it sit on our hardrive.  Sometimes those photos sit there for years. . These "memories" cannot be felt with our fingertips and taken out of a box and lovingly smoothed out and sorted.  I miss that kind of memory-keeping.

     My little secret has been that I have been stashing away my kids mementos in various places.  I have locks of their hair in ziploc bags in my dresser drawer (Luckily I can tell them apart by colour.  Ava's is fine and blond as corn silk.  Syd's has a reddish highlight.  Jack's is BLACK!!).  I have their baby teeth (GROSS). I have a piece of Sydney's blankie, an old pacifier of Jack's, all my babies' "first" Robeez slippers....real objects that I can touch when I need to feel nostalgic.  I've also been squirreling away their drawings, school work and crafts (in moderation).

This fall I have taken on a few projects in our home to display some of these memories.  I started with a photo wall, which I have been planning for YEARS!!  I've been buying and stashing frames from Ikea in my closet for a long time.  I've been pinning ideas for frame placement.  A few weeks ago, we decided enough was enough.  Time to get those frames on the wall.  James spent most of an entire weekend measuring, levelling and hanging those frames for me.  If that is not an act of love, I don't know what is.  It's all hung up now and waiting on prints.  I can't wait to post a photo of the finished version.  It was very difficult to choose which photos to display.  We have taken so many beautiful photos of the years.  I can't wait to see our little family history displayed on my wall!!







    The other thing I have been doing is scanning/photographing the kids' artwork.  I am going to display some scans in a mosaic style frame in their playroom.  James and I have never been able to make easy decisions about what to display on our walls.  I much prefer to look at my childen's cheery artwork than some abstract painting that I don't have a real connection to.   There is enough work here to keep me busy for months. Every piece I take out of the filing cabinet makes me smile.  I hope it will make our family and friends smile too when they finally see these treasures displayed proudly on the walls of our home!


So here is my attempt at making those special family treasures a part of our lives that we can enjoy every day.  I only wish I had more time to do it all.  I'm so busy making those memories with my kids that I have little time to document them the way I would like!!!!