If you are in the first year of your baby’s life chances are you are collecting a tremendous amount of stuff! Everything from the oh so important receiving blankets (that seem to be useful only for the first few months), to the bouncy chair that she’s outgrown to the “big kid” toys that you have waiting patiently to be played with. It can be easy to lose the important trinkets during this time, you are a busy mama! I want to share with you how I avoided stuffing the baby memorabilia in a shoebox only to be opened when I am cleaning and need a distraction or feel the need to have a cry about how grown up my baby is. I wanted to show off the “things” that my son had collected in his first week of life, rather than hide them so this is what I did:
Collecting your newborn’s memories
I used a shadow box frame (I bought mine at Superstore for under $25). Things that I added were:
- A picture of the ultrasound
- Baby and mom hospital bracelets
- Umbilical cord clamp
- A decoration from a flower arrangement
- Baby toque from the hospital
- Our information card from the hospital basinet
- Some pieces of a homemade baby card from a friend
- Ribbon from another flower arrangement that we received as a gift
Tell your birth story
I could have kept going, but the box was only so big and I wanted the really basic things that captured the first week. The sky is the limit with what you can put in these, so get creative! Obviously the kind of birth that you have (hospital, home, birthing centre) might reflect the types of items in your memory box- and that’s what I love about them, everyone has a different story to be told.
We hang ours in my son’s room, but I am sure as he gets older I will move it into one of my spaces like my bedroom or office space so that I can drift off to daydream about that tiny, perfect, sleepy baby of mine. Maybe one day he will get it back when he’s all grown up, maybe.
XO,