****Please don’t forget about the Pediascribe contest going on right now! Don’t pass up your chance to win!****

When KT was 2 1/2 years old, I attended baby shower. One of the gifts intrigued me. It was a simple recipe box decorated with stickers and jammed with index cards. The gift giver explained it was a place to jot down memories of cute thing your child did. It can also be a convenient place to write down milestones achieved. Parents of one child have enough trouble getting those events written down in the official baby book. Parents of more than one often fail miserably. Case in point: if 10 year old Nick’s baby book is completely accurate, he has only cut 3 teeth! I never got around to writing down the dates he cut the rest (or when he lost them for that matter!)

But back to the boxes….
After that baby shower, I bought simple plastic index card boxes at the local office store. I also bought a few packs of multi-colored 3×5 index cards. To decorate, I bought some brightly colored zoo animal stickers. Ta-da, I was in business.

From then on, I tried to jot down those little things that happened I didn’t want to forget. Many of these things I had forgotten about it until I went through their boxes today.

KT had a knack for messing up the lyrics of songs. Flipping through her memory box, I see several examples of that. One was her ending of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Instead of “you’ll go down in history,” KT sang, “you’ll go down and read a story.” Or her alternate lyrics for Winter Wonderland. You probably know it as “in the meadow we can build a snowman, and pretend that he is Parson Brown.” But KT, having no clue what a parson was, sang, “….and pretend that he is part of the ground.”

Nick had his share of lyric mess ups too. One that was cute was when he was singing the National Anthem. At the time was fascinated by rockets and space. So he sang, “and the rockets blast off…..” Awww.

These boxes also make a great place to file stories of cute things kids have done. KT was big into ice skating when she was a preschooler. During her first ice show (shortly before she turned 4) we watched as her group took the ice in the dim lighting. KT was in a group with two other girls, and suddenly the spot light was on this group of three. One of the others must have said something about not being able to see into the audience. My little KT with the big voice yelled out, “I can’t see my mommy either.” The crowd laughed! And then there was the time when we were driving at night. KT asked, “How can you see? It’s dark!” I replied, “I’ve got my headlights on.” KT incredulously said, “You’ve got lights on your head!?!?!?”

And then there is Nick….Nick, at the tender age of 18 months, was afraid of the crack between the floor and the elevator. When entering or exiting an elevator, he would approach the crack, bear walk on his hands and feet across it, and then get up and walk out. Or how about this… He and Mike were walking along a beach hand in hand. Nick had just turned 4. After strolling along quietly for some time, Nick looked up at Mike and with all seriousness said, “Dad, what’s potato salad?” Too funny. If you’ve potty trained a child, you know sometimes it can be frustrating. At the age of 3, Nick had a unique approach. After sitting on the toilet for awhile, he folded his hands, looked up and said, “Dear God, please help mine poop come out. Amen.” Try not to bust out laughing when your 3 year old does that! After he had a successful poop, he folded his hands again, looked up, and said, “Thank you, God.” Definitely a story I don’t want to forget!

And then there are the cards that chronicle the baby talk. Kids don’t always pronounce things correctly, but eventually they learn. Sometimes I miss those cute things they said. Here’s a few examples from KT’s word lists.
helicopter was heli-topter
Emily Elizabeth (the girl in the Clifford books) was Emily Buh-niz-ness
stethoscope was test-a-scope
lumber yard was yumber yard
undressed was un-naked

Nick hardly talked until he was 3. He communicated more by grunting. When he did talk, these are a few of his mispronunciations.
kiddie cone (at the ice cream shop) was a kitty cat cone
bless you was bah shoe
hot tub was hot cub

And the last category of cards is shown in the picture above. I would give a simple instruction, in this case “draw a man,” and the kids would draw it on an index card. It was interesting to see how much their fine motor skills progressed over time. There are far too few of these cards in their boxes, but I do have a huge plastic bin of their artwork, so I think I’m good.

So if you, like most parents I know, are having trouble keeping up with the recording of special things your kids do or say, consider this approach. The boxes stay handy and ready to accept a quick note. Just make sure you date it and write an age. And if you have more than one kid, it may not be a bad idea to write whose card it is so they don’t get mixed up. I guarantee, you’re kids will love looking through the stories when their older. And it’s always good to have something to threaten to read to their girlfriend or boyfriend!

Link to RSS Feed for comments on this post