We celebrated our twins' third birthday with a retro, whimsical, neutral Toy Story theme and the 90s kid in me was so giddy. Read for Toy Story party ideas and Toy Story themed food ideas!
Read MoreFrom start to finish, here's how I bake sourdough bread each week. I've fallen in love with this hobby and have tried to make the process as simple and streamlined as possible!
Read MoreLast on my list for organization projects to kick off 2024 (along with family yearbooks and file boxes for each child) was finding a good storage place for some of our most special family keepsakes. Our wedding memorabilia, mementos from our dating and newlywed years, and our family’s small keepsakes and loose photos all needed a home, and this set of archival storage boxes is perfect!
I got this idea from listening to Nancy Ray’s Work and Play podcast. She’s a former wedding photographer and a huge advocate for treating your family’s photos (professional photos, camera photos and iPhone photos alike) as what they truly are – your family’s legacy. Her approach inspired my giant personal photo overhaul, changing the way I approach, manage and store our family’s digital photos, but she also encourages safekeeping of printed photos and tangible memories. Her Legacy Photo System involves five boxes, but that was a little much for our family’s needs. Two is perfect for us now, and we can always get more if we need to.
These acid-free archival boxes with metal-reinforced sides prevent photos and papers from damage and from yellowing over time and while they’re obviously not fireproof or waterproof, they’re lightweight and an easy-to-access place to store things for generations.
As I was gathering photos from various places to put in these boxes, I realized that most of them have the file name and/or year they were printed in fine print on the back; however, that info isn’t really helpful if it doesn’t match up with when the photo was actually taken.
So I took a sharpie and wrote helpful information on the back of each one – date taken, ages, event if applicable. It made this project take a lot longer, but I know I’ll be glad I have those notes in many years when my memory gets fuzzy. You think you’ll remember, but I could barely remember things about photos that were taken 5 or 10 years ago, so I know it’ll only get harder!
In our wedding box, I put our save the date, stationery from our wedding, letters we wrote to each other, mementos from the day we got engaged, a handmade banner my then-7-year-old cousin sewed for us, the USB with our wedding photos, and all of our loose printed photos from our wedding. Essentially, anything pre-children goes in this box.
Our family box will house all of our printed family photos that aren’t in our yearbooks or in frames, along with any other small mementos from trips or events that we want to hang onto over the years.
The cut sides on these boxes are on purpose, in case you want to slide out something on the bottom out from the side instead of having to pick everything up. Shop these exact archival boxes HERE or via the widget below – I did the 2-pack, size 11”x15”x3”, which will hold years and years’ worth of photos for us, even 11x14 prints.
This was one more of those projects that allowed me to breathe a deep sigh of relief once I finished. The peace of mind from having these precious keepsakes organized, easy to access and in a safe place – it’s priceless!
Along with getting caught up on family yearbooks and photo boxes, one of my organization projects for the beginning of 2024 included getting a system in place for our kids’ papers. They’re still just in a Mother’s Day Out preschool program right now, so it’s mostly handprint crafts and coloring pages in our house. After they get their spotlight on the fridge, I don’t just want to toss them, but also don’t want them to pile up. I want to keep them in order and from getting damaged.
Enter: these DIY kids file boxes. They’re the perfect solution for keeping school papers worthy of saving, along with other paper things like birthday cards, letters, photos and more, organized and contained all in one place. When they leave the nest some day, they’ll have this to take with them and everything will be so easy to access and revisit.
I have to give credit for this idea to Francie Outlaw and her Filing System for Childhood Memories – I followed her steps pretty closely, just tweaking and adding a few things along the way.
These DIY kids memory boxes are really pretty simple. A clear file box for each child, one colored hanging folder per year (we color code pretty much everything in this house), with 2 manila folders in each. Starting with Pregnancy/Before You Were Born, First Year, 1 Year, 2 Years, 3 Years, 4 Years, 5 Years, and then Kindergarten all the way through 12th Grade – even a College folder if you want to include that.
The first manila folder for each year holds documents – things like report cards, certificates, notes from teachers, class photos, birthday cards and letters. The second manila folder holds classwork and artwork. For the pregnancy and first year sections, I put things like ultrasound photos, baby shower cards, birthday cards, and their baby book in those folders.
For each box you’ll need: one legal/letter file box, 21 colored hanging folders, 42 manila folders, 42 labels, and a name decal.
You can shop everything I used to make these boxes on Amazon HERE or using the widget below. The only thing I purchased elsewhere were the name decals from Etsy. She has tons of font and color options. I ordered the 2.5” size for the front of each box.
I couldn’t find these exact file boxes in anything but a four pack, but just search for stackable letter/legal file boxes if you don’t need as many. Each box took me about an hour to put together, mostly because I used my label maker instead of the file label stickers (we don’t have a printer – if you do, this will go much quicker!). Little bit of a tedious project on the front end, but this will set us up for ease and success going forward.
WHAT TO KEEP: Paring down these kinds of things is harder for me than paring down my own keepsakes. There’s a painted handprint for every holiday, things they colored, precious papers with their name in giant, carefully drawn letters. To each their own, but during these MDO/preschool years, I’m trying to keep 3-4 handprint things, 3-4 things they wrote/colored, and 3-4 other crafts per year.
For crafts when they’re small, I like to hang onto things that are actually their handiwork – not things you can tell the teacher mostly did for them. For cards and letters, I try to only hang onto ones that have more than just a name signed – any with sweet notes they’ll really love to go back and read later on! The goal is to keep the folders from being stuffed to the brim, so I’ll put things in there I think I might want to keep, and if/as they get full, I can go through and pare things down even more. We’ll see how things change as they get older and are bringing home different things, but this is working for us right now.
DATE. EVERYTHING: You think you’ll remember when something’s from, but it’s tough! As I started going through our kids’ storage bins and moving all the papers into these file boxes (they each also have a big bin where I put other keepsakes like clothes, memorabilia and bulkier things), I was finding so many cards, papers and pieces of artwork with zero way to know when they were from. I’ve made it a habit now to jot down the month/year/their age on the back of things as they come into our home and I know I’ll want to keep them.
If you’d rather not go the DIY route and would prefer to have one of these ready made for you, The Short Years company does just that! Their folders also come with an About Me template similar to the one above to fill out each year and attach a photo from their first day of school (I made my own and added a few more blanks). However, The Short Years boxes only come with one folder per year and only go from Preschool through 12th, so you won’t have the before you were born/first year/toddler section. They only release a set number of boxes every so often and they sell out quickly, so be sure to sign up for their email list.
Personally, I enjoyed putting the boxes together myself and being able to choose the colors of the folders, customize the name decals, and add the extra folders where it made sense. Again, HERE is the shoppable post with all of my supplies. And if you’d like to print my yearly About Me template, right click below to download.
If you’re overwhelmed by the influx of school papers and not sure what to do with it all, this is a great starting point. Happy filing!
What a labor of love and a long time coming. Our family yearbooks are finally here! I set out to make these happen a few years ago after seeing my friend Melanie share hers, but I knew I needed to get caught up after doing a complete overhaul of my digital + iPhone photo organization, changing my mindset around taking photos of my children, and really getting serious about those photos being our family’s legacy – not just taking up space on my phone.
Twenty years from now, our kids won’t be scrolling through our phones to revisit their childhood memories. We NEED tangible memories – and to narrow it down so they’re not burdened with an overload of photos.
I cover all the details of how I manage and store my personal photos on this blog, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but part of my system includes copying my iPhone photos onto my external hard drive (and a backup drive and the cloud) at least once a month. As I’m doing that, I go ahead and pick some favorites from that set of photos to save for our annual yearbook. This makes it super easy at the end of the year because we already have our very favorites saved and ready to go.
After lots of research and even starting an account to test things out on four different websites (Artifact Uprising, Milk Books, Blurb, and mPix), I ended up choosing mPix to create our yearbooks. Artifact Uprising’s products are gorgeous but a book the same size and same number of pages was more than twice the cost of mPix. I also very much preferred mPix’s layout options and the ease of their drag and drop features over any of the others.
TIP: If you do an mPix book and want the most easily customizable pages, choose “Empty Page” as you’re building out your spreads, then drag and drop the photos you want onto that page, then change the layout if needed. Way faster!
I went with the 11x8.5” Premium Linen Hardcover photo book, in the color Sand, with silver foil debossing on the front cover, and a dust jacket. I really would’ve preferred our last name and year foil stamped on the spine itself, but that option was super hard to find on any website in my price range. I ended up loving the dust jackets anyway! I chose a photo from the beginning-ish and end-ish of each year.
Doing a landscape layout meant I could fit more portrait-oriented photos on each page, plenty big but still with plenty of white space so it’s not too overwhelming. I did 3-6 photos per page for the most part.
These books come with 20 pages – ours ended up with 35-45 pages each (about 250 photos per year), so the extra pages, plus debossing and dust jackets made them about $120 a piece. I think these are WELL worth the cost. The quality is incredible – the cover is gorgeous and sturdy, the matte pages are beautifully printed and THICK – almost like cardstock. Plus, mPix usually runs a 40% off sale every first week of January, or you can get 25% off your first order any time.
Double check that whichever website you’re using has an auto-save feature and if not, save your work after each page – mPix does not have auto-save and I learned that the hard way, unfortunately!
Beware of issues with HEIC images (what your iPhone probably defaults to). None of the websites I tried accept HEIC photos, so you’ll have to convert to JPEG (use this website to convert several at once, or you can open one in Preview on a Mac and Export it as a JPEG). HOWEVER – when you convert from HEIC to JPEG, the image loses its original date taken info, so keeping things in chronological order was a complete mess. From now on, I’ve changed my phone settings to capture everything in JPEG (Settings, Camera, Formats, Most Compatible).
Another tip – make a Shared Album with your spouse to house your favorites/best of the best, so their favorites from their phone get included. I’d been keeping track of my favorites all along but getting caught up on five years’ worth of books meant Andrew had to go back and look through five years of photos on his phone and pick out his favorites, too. Having him put them in our Shared Album will make things easier from now on.
We’ll also do a Shared Album for videos that’ll make our yearly family movies even easier, too. For these, I just drag and drop all of our videos from each year into iMovie and it automatically puts them in the right order and makes a compilation. No transitions, no fancy editing, just all of our favorite videos from the year strung together to make one 30-45 minute movie. It’s so easy but such a treasure!
Honestly, I haven’t been taking as many photos of my kids these days. They’re little busybodies, and while I want to remember these days, I also want to cherish them as they’re happening and not have my phone or my big camera in their face constantly. I took about 650 total photos and videos on my phone in 2023 – there’s no magic number, but narrowing down 250 favorites from those was tough enough, and we still ended up with beautiful yearbooks full of photos that make us smile.
These yearbooks are incredibly special to us and I know will be cherished for a lifetime, and hopefully beyond. Whatever you do, no matter how you choose to do it, whether it’s monthly Chatbooks, big yearly albums, a combination of both, or even just regularly printing 4x6s of your favorite iPhone photos and putting them in an old-school album – print your photos. It’s so worth it!
