Martha Kids :: Memory Keeping

MSL Omnimedia no longer prints the Martha Stewart Babies or Martha Stewart Kids magazines, but the website is full of archived ideas, and Martha Stewart Living continues to print new kid-focused ideas and articles. This idea is from the archives and is a favorite of mine.

If you have children, you long to preserve the memories. It's so easy to forget the details. We know how fast they grow but it's easy to forget how small they were.

This framed memento will keep the memories intact: a hand over hand tracing of your child's hand at different ages.

I started the tracings of my twins' hands at three months and repeated them every three months for the first year, then every six months for the second year and now I'll trace them yearly until age five. Tracing a baby's hand isn't always easy but, as I've learned, even an imperfect tracing looks cute when the hands are stacked on top of each other. The look is artistic and not perfect. My twins' hands are traced on handmade paper and framed in a floating frame. Martha gives instructions for this memento here.

Another similar idea is shown here but uses cut-out hands rather than tracings.

There are so many ideas for preserving memories beyond regular scrapbooking and with a little time and effort you can savor childhood for years to come.