Happy Friday friends! Today I want to share with you the memory box that I’ve put together for Jamie. Each of our boys have a memory box (or two), filled with journals, scrapbooks, keepsakes and other memorabilia from their first years. Jamie’s box currently sits in my studio, as I’ve been busily finishing off his baby book this last week (funny how such ‘baby books’ are always completed way past the point when our children are in fact babies).
Clockwise from top left:
a) Jamie’s brag book: For each of the boys, I’ve put together a small photo album of some of my favourite photos from their first twelve months. Each album holds only about 36 photos, so it’s intended to just be a brief overview of their first year. It’s a nice little addition to the memory box because the boys’ first year photo books are stored on separate bookshelves, not in the boxes. Plus, it’s always nice to just quickly flip through a small album and be able to see how much they changed over the course of twelve short months. This black cloth one is from Kikki-K.
b) Jamie’s ‘official’ baby book: I’ve bought one of these for each of the three boys, as I like having an ‘official’ place where I can write down all the details about their birth and their milestones. There are, of course, some pages that always confound me (e.g. am I really meant to remember what the fashion was like the day they were born?) but overall, I think these baby books are a worthy investment of time and money. This particular one is also from Kikki-K (yes, I am a fan).
c) Cards and notes: A memory box is a great place for storing all those cards and notes of congratulations that people send you when you have a baby! I like tying ours up with a piece of string to give it an added tactile touch (and also for keeping them together).
d) Jamie’s first year journal: This book is similar to the one I used for my own personal visual journal. I put in a custom order so that it would have 366 pages – one for each day of Jamie’s first year of life. I’ll be writing a separate post about this in the near future, but I originally got the idea from these 365 Days notebooks that Kikki-K sells. I’d bought one for Pete after he was born and had used it for his first year scrapbook. It was great, except that the perfect book binding meant that once there were photos stuck on every page, the binding could not actually accommodate the resulting thickness. The beauty of Badger and Chirp‘s handmade journals is that they cope very well with having lots of photos stuck inside. Plus, the cover is made from beautiful soft lambskin leather, and you can choose your own colour!
e) Other things hidden underneath the items above are ultrasound photos and CDs in a Kraft envelope, a hand-knit vest by my mum, and spare birth announcement cards.
It feels amazing to have finally completed all of Jamie’s baby/1st year scrapbooking, and an absolute joy to look through everything with the boys and our parents. It really is a great reminder of how precious our children’s lives are.
Do you keep memory boxes for your children or perhaps for yourself?
